Phala Network & Decentralized Computing Cloud
Phala Network provides computing power and backend hosting for complex applications while remaining decentralized and trustless.
As a next-generation cloud computing protocol, Phala Network offers a powerful decentralized alternative to centralized computing solutions like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Phala utilizes a scalable blockchain-based infrastructure to securely and privately execute deployed applications. It’s among the first Polkadot parachains to be integrated into the Apillon platform for plug-and-play use.
Clouds are a-changing
When new centralized applications are created, the software is usually hosted on a remote server or a cloud offered by centralized cloud computing services. Clouds provide computing resources such as data storage or computing power, lowering business costs and ensuring seamless automatic app upgrades. Today, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) industry is worth billions of dollars, and users can access Service-as-a-Software (Saas) apps online without the need to install them on their computers.
A vast majority of applications are still built on centralized cloud solutions, most often provided by the above-mentioned Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. These tech giants act as trusted third parties that maintain, transfer, and store user data, creating a trust-based Web2 system. But are they really trusted?
While centralized cloud solutions provide great computing power, they always come with certain disadvantages that can put user data at risk. Susceptible to data breaches, malware, security threats, and reliability issues, centralized computing can be described as “stoppable”.
Decentralized computing based on blockchain technology can provide solutions for issues related to security and reliability. With a global and decentralized network of computing resources, users, including enterprises and individuals, can share and transfer data without the need to trust third-party providers.
How does Phala bring together the best of Web2 and Web3?
What if we could have both — the massive computing power of centralized cloud services and the privacy, security, and data confidentiality of a blockchain-based system?
Marrying massive cloud processing with data confidentiality, Phala Network takes a distributed and versatile approach to cloud computing.
Unlike centralized cloud computing providers, it doesn’t own any servers or data centers. Instead, it provides decentralized hosting by combining blockchain technology with an off-chain cloud network.
How does it work?
The infrastructure is supported by a hardware solution that’s already embedded in most modern computer processors. The off-chain nodes in the peer-to-peer network are based on Secure Enclaves, also known as Trusted Execution Environments or TEEs. TEE is a secure area that’s embedded in the central processing unit (CPU).
Technically, you, too, could participate in the Web3 peer-to-peer computing network by putting the excess capacity of your computer’s CPU to work. Inside this secure enclave, code and data are completely private, because the rest of the computer has no access to this area. The data can only be put out with authorization, guaranteeing that it cannot be tampered with or leaked.
At the same time, the published smart contracts and their statuses are stored on the blockchain. This ensures that all the programs’ internal states and users’ interactions that run on Phala Network are encrypted.
What sets Phala Network apart from other dencentralized cloud computing providers is its impressive interoperability across chains: the goal is to serve any blockchain with its trustless computation power while protecting the data layer.
Build with Phala on Apillon
With the integration into Apillon Web3 development platform, you’ll be able to seamlessly build your Web3 projects and dapps with Phala Network’s powerful computing resources that can compare to large cloud service providers like AWS.
At the same time, your project will guarantee users the total privacy, confidentiality, and security of their data.
Phala has already built several products on its network, such as Phat Contract, PhalaWorld, SubBridge, Phala App, and Web3 Analytics. The latter, for example, provides a robust and decentralized alternative to Google Analytics.
About Phala
Phala Network is a decentralized cloud that offers secure and scalable computing for Web3.
With Phat Contracts, an innovative programming model enabling trustless off-chain computation, developers can create new Web3 use cases.
As a member parachain of the Polkadot cross-chain ecosystem, Phala is able to provide computing power to other blockchain applications while protecting the data layer, enabling possibilities like privacy-protected DeFi trading positions and transaction history, co-computing DID confidential data, developing light-node cross-chain bridges, and more.
⧓ About Apillon
The Apillon platform serves as a unified gateway to the Web3 services provided by linked Polkadot parachains. Following the multi-chain vision, Apillon powers the transition of developers to Web3, simplifying its adoption in the real economy, and expanding its versatility as the ecosystem grows. With Apillon, Web3 services are within reach for every developer, regardless of their background and experience with blockchain technology.