Jun 26, 2021

11 min read

Stratos — A New Era of Decentralization

The Meaning of Our Name ‘Stratos’

The name Stratos comes from the word ‘stratosphere’. The stratosphere is an important layer of the earth’s atmosphere. The bottom of the stratosphere is 10 km above the ground, 8 km at the poles, and its upper boundary is about 50 km above the ground. The air in the stratosphere mainly flows in the horizontal direction, while the flow of air in the vertical direction is weak, so the layers of air are stable and there is almost no vertical convection.

Stratos is the infrastructure for decentralized services. If I can compare the earth to the blockchain ecosystem, then Stratos is the stratosphere surrounding the blockchain environment, providing blockchain applications with decentralized storage, decentralized databases, and decentralized computing services.

The Significance of Decentralization

Compared with centralization, the two most important differences of decentralization are Equal Rights and Data Ownership. Let me explain what I mean by that. In a decentralized system, all participants have equal rights, and all data belongs to the data creator, not to the owner of the system. For example, although the customer services, information search, online storage, and email services of the centralized system provided by Google are free, the real cost is your personal data. Google will use your personal data to gain commercial benefits.

The blockchain is decentralized by providing equal rights and data ownership. Each node participating in the blockchain has equal rights, although some nodes with stronger computing power or nodes participating in staking have a greater chance of generating the block. The ledger data of the blockchain is public, but unlike a centralized network, the verification right for the key data only belongs to the owner of the private key which cannot be taken by anyone.

This can be approached from another perspective as well, by asking the question: Is decentralization the same as blockchain? Here I would like to describe the two terms in a more technical manner. Blockchain is a network where multiple nodes participate asynchronously through a consensus mechanism. The data on multiple nodes is forced to be synchronized within a fixed time interval and reach consensus. Blockchain is a successful use case of a decentralized system and implementation, but it is definitely not the only solution. Some decentralized projects add blockchain into their system design for different business needs which don’t require blockchain, and thus these projects set themselves up to fail.

“Stratos decentralized infrastructure will greatly shorten the arrival time of the new Era of Decentralization. Stratos’s objective is to be like Bitcoin in 2010 which created a blockchain empire, or like Ethereum smart contracts in 2015 which enriched the prosperity of the blockchain system. Stratos will become the most solid cornerstone of the Era of Decentralization, supporting the decentralized service infrastructure, and contributing to the blockchain industry. Providing the decentralized system with air, water, and sunlight, we develop the entire ecosystem in the stratosphere, making it more stable, more prosperous, and more sustainable.”

The blockchain system design has been verified since Bitcoin appeared decades ago. The different implementations of different public chains have proven that the blockchain is an excellent system for providing public ledgers and smart contract services on top of the ledgers. But besides that, the design of blockchain is not suitable for all projects that aim to provide decentralized services.

Therefore, blockchain is only one of the application subsets of decentralization. As the provider of the infrastructure for decentralized services, Stratos uses different decentralized components rather than only using the blockchain. Stratos is the infrastructure of the blockchain industry, and provides the full spectrum of services for the entire blockchain industry, rather than just attaching to a public chain, let alone being solely an add-on product of a public chain ecosystem.

Since the birth of the blockchain industry in 2010, the sector has been looking for a breakthrough in serving traditional industries. But since blockchain can only provide public ledger services, it hasn’t been making a lot of progress for the industries that don’t need ledger based services. At the same time, due to the unprecedented development of the token economy in the blockchain industry, most of the projects are mainly built around tokens. This has led to even more misconceptions for people outside the blockchain industry. Many people outside the blockchain industry believe that the blockchain and decentralized systems have no practical value due to lack of widely used applications in traditional industries. The real situation is that decentralized systems cannot be used in traditional industries not because the traditional industries do not need decentralized services, but that current decentralized services fail to meet the needs of traditional industries.

The infrastructure of Stratos decentralized services, whether from design or development, is not only for the blockchain industry but also for better serving centralized traditional industries. Stratos will eventually commercialize the provision of decentralized services, providing decentralized systems with more efficient, secure, and stable infrastructure and services for centralized traditional businesses.

Stratos Past And Present

The Stratos team is a group of top-notch developers. The team members come from Canadian National Railways, Amazon, Expedia, Alibaba, and many other well-known companies. Everyone has world-class enterprise-level development experience.

One-third of the team members are from Mindgeek, a top 10 Internet company with the largest traffic volumes. During the 7 years of working at Mindgeek, as the founder of the Cloud team, I designed and developed the data platform from scratch to process millions of records of data per second and hundreds of billions of records per day. The data platform provides various data services for more than 100 million users worldwide every day. This valuable design and development experience of creating a global data network represents Stratos’s history, allowing Stratos to have the genes to achieve large-scale commercial applications from the very beginning of its creation.

Thanks to the great amount of practical experience and the basis of Google GFS and Hadoop HDFS architecture, the team expands the distributed storage to decentralized storage solutions. Stratos decentralized storage is born with the high-performance storage module.

Stratos is composed of 4 modules and 3 layers.

This can sound a bit technical, but bear with me. The 4 modules Stratos services are composed of include blockchain, decentralized storage, decentralized databases, and decentralized computing. Just as the earth needs air, water, soil, and sunlight, each of these four elements is indispensable to the provision of the necessary conditions for the growth of everything. Different combinations of these four modules will also provide various decentralized services for the blockchain industry and traditional industries.

The three layers are the value layer, the resource layer, and the meta service layer. Each layer corresponds to a different consensus mechanism. The value layer uses Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus, the resource layer uses Proof-of-Traffic (PoT) consensus, and the meta service layer uses Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus.

The design of three layers and three consensuses smartly solves the impossible triangle problem of decentralization to the greatest extent possible.

1. PoA is the closest consensus algorithm to centralization, ensuring that the meta service layer remains efficient when decentralized

2. PoS is to make sure the value layer is secure and robust

3. PoT is a completely decentralized consensus algorithm, which ensures that the resource layer can expand indefinitely, allowing more resources to join the Stratos network

The three layers are also three types of nodes. Miners can choose to join the Stratos network based on their varying hardware specifications and requirements.

The four modules of Stratos are composed of three layers, combining different consensus mechanisms to form Stratos’s internal solid triangle, which can provide customers with stable, reliable, and efficient decentralized services.

Stratos Unique Incentive Mechanism PoT

At present, most of the blockchain projects on the market use PoW and PoS consensus mechanisms, but they all have, to some extent, limitations and drawbacks. In the real world, the volume of traffic and the number of users are most commonly used to measure the value of internet companies. Traffic will bring more attention which leads to huge commercial value and benefits. Therefore, using traffic to verify the value provided by each node is very much required.

From another perspective, if a node needs to handle higher concurrent traffic, the overall performance of the node needs to be higher. The overall performance of a node is determined by computing power, storage, and network bandwidth. Therefore, motivating the miners using the consensus mechanism of PoT will be much healthier and more effective than PoS or PoW. Miners will not just focus on storage or workload but need to focus on overall performance and increase the network bandwidth of each machine so that the Stratos network can ensure the health and efficiency of the network during high-speed expansion.

The development of Web 3.0 is not only about the richness of the applications on Web 3.0, but also the stability and efficiency of the underlying network. Therefore, Stratos has designed the unique PoT consensus to better encourage all participating miners to maintain the effectiveness of the network and further promote durable and vigorous development and operations.

Stratos Ecosystem and Applications

Stratos is built on top of four different “modules” which enable a variety of decentralized product applications. Together, these create a holistic harmonious, consistent, and mutually reinforcing ecosystem.

Accelerated Network (Decentralized CDN)

Stratos decentralized storage not only allows users to upload and download data efficiently but also allows users to directly play audio or video across the network without downloading it in advance. For every user or developer, this will be an important feature. Developers can use this feature provided by Stratos to make a future “Decentralized YouTube” or “Decentralized Apple Music” possible.

2. The Optimized NFT

Our NFT platform is developed by a combination of blockchain and decentralized storage. It provides users with a digital asset copyright trading platform as well as digital asset usage rights trading.

For example, it’s impossible in the current NFT market for musicians to retain the copyright and sell music to fans in digital form. But it can be easily achieved in the Stratos NFT market. Musicians only need to sell the music copyright once, or just to sell the right to use, so that more fans can enjoy their music.

When Stratos launches the NFT platform for usage rights trading, it will transform the NFT platform from a luxury auction platform to a digital trading marketplace for everyone. Music, videos, games, artwork, legal contract templates, and other products will be easily traded on the platform after they are digitized.

3. Enhanced Oracle

Stratos decentralized database can help to build a new Oracle platform.
In terms of data security, which is what people are most concerned about, Stratos does not rely on economic punishment to prevent nodes from evil-doing, like other oracles, but can fundamentally use technology to directly ensure that the data cannot be tampered with.

In terms of data structure, Stratos completely removes the limitation that the blockchain on the market can only store ledger information. The Stratos decentralized database can support a more diverse data structure and can better collect data of different dimensions from different sources to perform cross calculations to ensure the credibility and richness of the final data output.

4. Decentralized Social Media

The key to decentralized social media is equal rights between accounts and the ownership of each account’s data. Stratos’s decentralized database can fully guarantee equal rights and data ownership, and prevents the centralized voice from drowning out the voice of any personal account.

5. Edge Computing and IoT

Stratos not only encourages small data centres to access the network as a whole but also welcomes individual nodes to access the network to provide decentralized computing services. Small data centres can form the backbone of the Stratos network, the information highway, and individual nodes are the branches and leaves of the highway. Although the computing power of individual nodes is limited, individual nodes can take advantage of the low latency of the network to provide users around the node with edge computing services required by smart appliances, smart home networking, and industrial IoT devices.

Improve Emerging Industries

In the past ten years, blockchain has been used as an important technology to provide a platform for many emerging industries, such as Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Cryptocurrency, Non-fungible tokens (NFT), Decentralized Exchanges, and other applications. However, these applications are unable to meet all the needs of the market For example, it has proven difficult to support services for transactions, storage, computing, and decentralized database simultaneously.

Stratos addresses needs by providing more secure, more complete, and more efficient solutions than similar products on the market. Stratos can not only meet different business needs, but also improves the infrastructure and architecture of the entire industry by providing one-stop services and solutions.

Enter Traditional Industries

Blockchain has not seen many achievements in most traditional industries, not because traditional industries do not need decentralized solutions, but because current decentralized solutions cannot meet the commercial requirements of traditional industries.

Stratos opens the gates of traditional industries by providing fully scaled decentralized infrastructure solutions plus Decentralized CDN, Optimized NFT, Edge Computing, and other services. At the same time, Stratos is also actively partnering with relevant projects and has achieved a number of strategic partnerships to jointly develop products and services leveraging the Stratos ecosystem.

The Era of Decentralization

Human beings have gone through many eras, from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, from the Age of Steam to the Age of Electricity, and then to the Internet Age. In the last few years, the development of centralized Internet platforms has reached a plateau where it becomes a winner-takes-all market. After the rapid growth of the centralized platform, it is bound to decline. The relationship between the internet centralized social media platform and its participants is gradually changing from aPositive-sum game to aZero-sum game.

We believe that people expect the Era of Decentralization to come sooner rather than later. The equal rights and data ownership brought by the arrival of this era will greatly accelerate and boost the development of the overall industry productivity.

Stratos decentralized infrastructure will greatly shorten the arrival time of the new Era of Decentralization. Stratos’s objective is to be like Bitcoin in 2010 which created a blockchain empire, or like Ethereum smart contracts in 2015 which enriched the prosperity of the blockchain system. Stratos will become the most solid cornerstone of the Era of Decentralization, supporting decentralized service infrastructure, and contributing to the blockchain industry. Providing the decentralized system with air, water, and sunlight, we develop the entire ecosystem in the stratosphere, making it more stable, more prosperous, and more sustainable.

Today, June 9, 2021, is just a day for most people, but it is a milestone for the new era of decentralization. Today, the Stratos network’s Initial Decentralized Offering (IDO) has gone live.

It’s just the beginning for our decentralized infrastructure. Let us work together to welcome and embrace this great era!

The brightest future is to be expected!

Bin Zhu

Founder of Stratos

The night of our IDO

About Stratos

Stratos is the next generation of decentralized Data Mesh that provides a scalable, reliable, self-balanced storage, database, and computation network. Stratos is born for scaling blockchain process capacity while retaining the decentralized benefits of a distributed protocol including trustlessness, traceability, verifiability, privacy, and other competitive strengths.

Stratos is best positioned to support data storage and adoption for developers and users in this ever-expanding digital economy. Stratos strives to make decentralized data adoption easier for the blockchain industry and Web 3.0.

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