Synereo, the company developing a decentralized tech stack to allow web applications to exist without centralized servers, concluded a successful funding campaign last week, raising more than $4.7 million USD, selling both equity and AMPs - the platform’s native cryptocurrency.
Synereo initially started with an attempt to create a decentralized social network, but after spending years developing a decentralized social media solution on the basis of existing blockchain technologies, the company recently announced that it had widened its operations in order to develop its own blockchain enabled decentralized computation platform, capable of running all forms of decentralized applications, with the company’s social network being one such application.
With this move, Synereo is heading towards a decentralised ‘World Computer’ - a network of personal devices, functioning as a unitary virtual machine, rendering central servers and data centers redundant. This idea was initially proposed by the Ethereum foundation, and has since attracted several additional teams, providing little to no deviance from the original make-up. Synereo’s proposal introduces an improvement to the industry standard in that it offers a complete tech-stack - incorporating all faculties needed to support decentralized computation without central servers.
The recently concluded funding campaign was launched shortly after Synereo announced its Blockchain 2.0 architecture, ‘RChain’, which lies at the core of Synereo’s evolved tech stack. Synereo stated that funds raised during the campaign will be used to expand its team significantly, ensuring that its RChain-based technology stack can go live towards the end of 2017.
According to Synereo, RChain solves problems of existing blockchains, enabling decentralized systems to be much faster, infinitely scalable and cheaper to maintain. In addition, Synereo’s platform comes with its own distributed cloud storage, allowing for efficient decentralized hosting of heavy media, as well as a reflective smart-contracting language. With this, Synereo hopes to fully disrupt the traditional role of centralized servers.
James Currier, Managing Partner at NFX, commented: “If you do the analysis, Synereo comes out as the superior platform for developing decentralized apps. It runs fully distributed instead of massively replicated. It’s JVM top to bottom rather than Python. It’s forward compatible, vs other platforms anticipating multiple hard- forks. Synereo has the identity layer built in which provides distribution advantages and network effects. Lastly, fine-grained concurrency, vs other platforms’ linearity, provides greater speeds and scalability”
In order to populate its platform, and to ensure fast growth and adaptation, Synereo has recently announced a sizeable grant project, inviting developers and entrepreneurs to develop decentralized applications for its platform, to foster the development of a decentralized ecosystem, competing with the current centralized paradigm. Recent partner NFX Guild also announced that it will include a selected few laureates of Synereo’s grant project in its prestigious Accelerator Program.
Synereo’s CEO, Dor Konforty, remarked: “We are now in the final stage of interviews, and will soon be selecting the first projects that will receive AMP grants to build on Synereo’s tech stack. We have 300 applications and it has taken our team a while to go through them and to choose from many amazing development teams and projects. Overall we are very excited at the level of interest to build the future of the decentralized internet with Synereo”
According to Synereo’s development plan, the company’s anticipated RChain-based architecture will be up and running towards the end of 2017, ready to host Synereo’s social network beta shortly afterwards. In the meantime, Synereo is further developing the alpha version of its social network, and has invited the public to install its alpha nodes and participate in the test phase of the network.
