So this appears to be a distributed network of random people's devices, and the 'blockchain' aspect is entirely unrelated to the actually useful parts of how the tech works. It's just how people are paid for contributing their devices to the network?<p>Am I missing anything? Are the non-blockchain parts of this actually interesting?
I was curious about their claims regarding confidential computing so I checked out their Github organization (<a href="https://github.com/edge" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/edge</a>), but it seems there's very little activity there and there's not a single reference to Intel SGX (the enclave they claim to use). So I'm a bit skeptical about their claims. SGX is also not a general-purpose technology and can only run highly specialized code, to my knowledge there's currently no way to run general-purpose code that e.g. uses syscalls (there are some projects that try to fix this though).
Looking at the pricing page, this seems to be almost as expensive as AWS/GCP, while having unknown performance characteristics of random people's devices and network connections. Not sure why I would pay for this instead...
One thing I always look for in companies in the block chain space is the About section. I want to see real names and faces on these projects. The more information the better. Sometimes they just might have a front-man like a professor that wrote a white paper, but I want to see the people actually involved. This site has no about.<p>To confuse things further, there is another company called edge.app which is an app to buy and sell crypto. I don't think they're affiliated
From my rudimentary understanding (i.e., what I've just read on the homepage) I don't know how "blockchain" fits into this, but I could make a guess that api signatures are "blockchain verified"?<p>From that same rudimentary understanding, I would also expect performance to be comparable to Tor.
I have been tracking new heroku style deployments tools, CDNs and ADN.<p>They are part of this new trend of platform calling themselves Application Delivery Network, wherein stateless (either containerized or microvm-ed) services are deployed closed to consumer.<p>That spaces is getting hyper-competitive and crowded.
These guys are trying to differentiate themselves by calling themselves blockchain-powered network. To be honest, you do not have to be blockchain powered, it might just work against you as you might have to cross certain thresholds to serve content reliably. I rather prefer services and content delivered by datacenters that are certified and has some security standards than random devices in the network, unless they can somehow guarantee some standards on the devices.
Some day, people will start treating their compute, everywhere as rentable commodity, and the price will go to almost zero. CPU + storage + network costs will go to zero, the "edge" will be everywhere, and organizing hosting and launching websites will never be the same. Maybe we'll even get a better federated services out of all of it (if you get people comfortable with leasing their capital, maybe they get comfortable with running services for themselves with that capital other times).<p>This isn't it for me (blockchain is an anchor around the neck of the idea IMO), but I look forward to the day that this idea finds it's perfect (or perfectly timed) execution.
So IPFS with incentives to run a node?<p>One big issue I see with IPFS is that you or someone has to pin the content or it is gone for ever. This builds centralized services that offer pinning of your content.