We have come a long way since the early days of the Internet, from a read-only medium to a force that is driving the world economics, entertainment, education, and finance.
But fundamentally, it is nowhere close to its original vision of a decentralized and open space for innovation. In contrast, today’s internet is largely centralized, with tech giants in control of massive data centers and critical infrastructure.
This is exactly what Bless aims to change with the world’s first shared computer, which is actually decentralized and automatically run by the users.
Bless is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project that was founded during the last bear market and is planning to launch its mainnet in Q1 2025.
Bless started as an open-source project within the off-chain community, created by Michael Chen from Binance Research, Derek Anderson from Akash Network and Butian Li and Liam Zhang, from Wabi and NGC Ventures respectively. Both encountered challenges in distributed computing and came together to design a solution that transforms fragmented computing resources into a cohesive, accessible network.
Earlier this year, the project completed raising $8 million in pre-seed and seed funding rounds to support its operations. The rounds were led by NGC Ventures and M31 Capital, with Frachtis co-leading alongside MH Ventures, No Limit Holdings, Plassa Capital, Interop Ventures, and other investors.
The funding is being utilized to take this global network powered by everyday devices to the masses and help crypto and dApps gain mainstream adoption by rewarding users for what they already do on a regular basis.
The thing is, people spend a lot of their time on their devices—like phones and laptops—using various apps and websites, and yet they don’t get anything from service providers. Now, imagine getting rewarded simply for using your favorite apps. Isn’t that exciting?
Well, Bless aims to do just that without requiring users to take any additional steps, like installing a node extension. Users simply open an application and can immediately start sharing unused computing resources from their own devices with their favorite websites and services.
In exchange for their computing power, users get rewarded by both the business provider and Bless. This way, Bless enables users to have greater control over their device usage and makes decentralized edge computing accessible to all.
Redefining Growth with User-Driven Decentralization
In the expansive world of crypto, which is running amok with blockchains, Bless offers a standardized network for developers to build applications fully integrated with prominent layer one blockchains.
But what’s more exciting is Bless’ dynamic consensus mechanism. This allows dApps built on Bless to choose the most efficient consensus algorithms for each and every workload—something that hasn’t been possible until now. Developers can even combine consensus methods and verify the execution on any blockchain, whether it’s L1 or L2.
Now, for scalability, Bless enables different tasks to be handled by different nodes as per their computing requirements. For this, the network makes use of automated node orchestration, whose task is to find the most suitable node for each workload.
What happens here is that each task is first evaluated by this system, and then user devices are matched to tasks based on their hardware capabilities. This approach allows for optimal task assignment and improves reliability by ensuring that each user device can actually handle the task that is assigned to it and prevent lower-powered devices from being overwhelmed by heavy loads.
For task assignment, Bless further uses a randomized algorithm called Greco-Latin square distribution. This enhances network security, reduces the risk of manipulation by bad actors, and ensures fairness across nodes.
So, under Bless’s framework, applications can choose to conduct token and governance-related workloads on one blockchain, such as Ethereum, and handle data availability on another, like Celestia. Meanwhile, other tasks—such as gaming, machine learning, and AI interfaces that require intensive computation—are run through Bless’ faster and fully decentralized off-chain environment.
Interestingly, all of this is achieved through the dApps’s very own users, resulting in computational support, which scales directly with their user growth. So, the more users the application has, the more community-provided computing power it has.
This way, for the first time, applications and their users can enjoy end-to-end decentralization but without the cost, complexities, and performance issues of decentralized networks. As a result, Bless dApps benefit from the fast speeds of centralized systems along with the security of decentralization and the efficiency of off-chain computations with the assurance of on-chain finality.
Furthermore, developers and businesses can share success directly with their audience by rewarding them for their contributions rather than funneling revenue to tech giants. This reinvestment into their own audience and businesses creates a new growth model, potentially creating a positive feedback loop.
Overall, with its innovative approach, Bless aims to remove apps’ reliance on institutional operators and make the system truly and completely community-driven. By lowering the barriers to decentralized computing, Bless is ushering in an era of secure user-empowered applications.
Image: Bless.Network on Twitter