Multicoin Capital - Composable Web3 Compute

Computers do three things, and only three things:

You cannot compute without storage, and so naturally most of the earliest Web3 protocols were focused on storage. This includes Arweave (in which we are investors), Filecoin, and Sia.

We have been thinking about the Web3 compute sector for years, and have made a number of investments: Livepeer, The Graph, and Render Network. Notably, all three of these Web3 compute primitives are highly specialized around a very specific type of computation.

Today we are excited to announce our latest investment in the category: Fluence, in which we recently led a $9 million round alongside Alameda Ventures, Tiger Global, Protocol Labs, Arweave Capital, Polymorphic Capital, OP Crypto, Signum Capital and UOB Venture Management.

A simple mental model of Fluence is decentralized and permissionless AWS Lambda. Fluence can read data from any public data source—IPFS, Filecoin, Arweave, Ceramic, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Flow, etc.—compute over it, and store the newly computed data back in any of these repositories. 

Additionally, as opposed to blockchains where all nodes replicate the same data, Fluence manages the execution over a peer-to-peer (p2p) network with customized decentralization, fault tolerance, and cost on a per-function basis. 

Fluence is powered by a custom programming language called Aqua, designed for building distributed systems in a trustless environment and managing the execution across a p2p network. Application developers can use Aqua to create custom p2p algorithms for data replication, computation verification, failover, and load balancing. Aside from scalable computation, this enables the design space for p2p systems that are easier to be built and seamlessly composable with each other.

What is Fluence useful for? Computations that need at least one of the following:

Here are some concrete examples of these applications in practice:

Fluence embodies an extremely bold vision for the future: a logically centralized computer that can scale infinitely and coordinate and process any number of functions across any data inputs in a permissionless setting.

This year Fluence will launch an on-chain marketplace for hosting and compute resources and for code.  Code authors will share in hosting revenue based on the use of their code modules. The code, when uploaded, is immutable, preventing malware from being inserted later and as long as the modules are being used and hosted, the dependencies will remain functional without the risk of being taken down by a centralized party. As developers upload more code, all of which naturally composes using Aqua, the Fluence network compounds. Composability is the greatest substrate to facilitate compounding.

Moreover, Fluence enables the ultimate dream of open source: get paid for writing high-quality, open-source code that others can use. This monetization model is at the core of the Fluence ethos and will help re-shape the way we think about value capture in open-source systems. Developers have been dreaming about this monetization model since the advent of open source 30 years ago; Fluence is making it possible.

The SDK is available now, and there are already thousands of services running across the network. If you want to help build the substrate to scale Web3 computation, Fluence is hiring, and you can meet up with the team at ETH Denver this week. Reach them at @fluence_project on Telegram and Twitter.