Meson Network: The Web3 Protocol Democratising Internet Services
When Sherlock Shi and co-founder, identified as Leo, decided to found Meson Network in 2020, their goal was simple: solve blockchain storage and data transmission problems.
The duo’s emancipation mission began when they first met three years earlier in 2017 at the TechCrunch Shanghai Hackathon where Sherlock and his team succeeded.
Sherlock and Leo found that people were kidnapped by centralised bandwidth services and felt that they were keen to provide Web3 developers with a completely decentralised bandwidth service option, Meson Network’s Head of Community, who identified himself as Martin, told Arweave News.
Meson Network is getting support from the Web3 ecosystem, Martin believes, citing an example from one of the Network’s testnets in 2021 where, according to him, many miners supported it and the number of nodes increased from a few hundred to more than 50,000 within a month. Its long term goal is to be the largest bandwidth marketplace in the world and a decentralised content delivery network with small and medium scale customers as its core.
Building A Bandwidth AirBnB
Across the world, there has been a steady increase in digital data production and consumption. In 2018 people used over 3.1 million gigabytes of data every minute, more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created every day. By 2020, the amount of data in the world was put at 44 zettabytes and estimated to rise to 175 zettabytes by 2025.
Growing number of internet users, many of whom access huge volumes of high quality digital data contents ranging from text, pictures, audios and videos, need high bandwidth to increase the amount of data transmitted to their devices over an internet connection in a given amount of time.
Meson tries to satisfy this need by using a blockchain model which allows people across the world with idle bandwidth to exchange it with Meson for tokens and for those who need bandwidth to borrow from anywhere in the world.
The blockchain model which opens bandwidth exchange, is used by Meson as opposed to direct sales model used by cloud vendors to target long tail markets which Meson believes is growing and is stronger than the large accounts market.
One of the advantages of its model, Meson said, is removing human interaction in the system and to scale by leveraging on the forces of demand and supply.
Users do not need to care about how to deal with people, they only need to upload or access the resources in the marketplace according to standards and protocols, Martin said.
Accelerating Content Delivery The Meson Way
Web pages need more than a strong internet to load fast. Slow loading websites frustrate visitors and could result in losses for site owners. While 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, 40% of consumers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
A regular website whose server is based far away from visitors will load slowly because visitors will need to load all static contents on the website including images, CSS stylesheets and javaScript files. Some websites use content delivery network to distribute access to proxy servers which are located around the world. Website visitors are served by the server nearest to them, guaranteeing speed and minimising outages and security breaches.
Google, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Service operate data centres but their services have not been without issues. Amazon Web Service had three outages in one month in December 2021, with one lasting about five hours, disrupting the operations of digital firms such as Slack, Epic Games. An outage at Microsoft’s Azure UK South in 2020 caused by cooling system failure resulted in the country’s Covid-19 tracking site going offline. In the same year, Azure’s data centre in Central India experienced an outage due to power cuts and overheating.
Regular outages suffered by centralised data centres raises the need for a decentralised content delivery network devoid of a single point failure.
Meson Network’s decentralised CDN is powered by 30,000 nodes spread across the world. The Network is able to prevent outages through the strength of numbers of these nodes. If a node goes offline, others can serve contents. Meson also provides an opportunity for owners of general purpose servers to get incentives to join the network and for users to benefit from reduced costs.
The role Meson Network can play in ensuring smooth internet services for individuals and corporate users will expand as internet users grow across the world and technology advances. As Meson blossoms, its impact would be measured by how it’s able to free big corporations’ grip on internet services and democratise the space.
Web3 is a great social practice, in which Meson hopes that when developers develop Web3 applications, there is a decentralised and good experience Web3 native infrastructure to choose from so as to break the current dilemma of the deployment of Web3 applications in centralised cloud services, he also said.
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