WTF is Quilibrium?
Quilibrium is a MPC protocol under active development with a bold mission: to secure every bit of traffic on the web. We believe that previous attempts to achieve this through trusted institutions have failed. This is evident from revelations by figures like Snowden, as well as the actions of companies like Cloudflare, whose role in deplatforming has raised concerns about their power to act as "internet cops."
To address these issues, we need to decentralize the web securely—servers, storage, and traffic alike. This is no small challenge, and solving it requires robust, hard-tech solutions.
Cassandra Heart, Q founder and lead dev, began to work on this idea in 2018 and since then a lot has been accomplished (see the Q story).
How Does Q Differ from Other Attempts?
Historically, there have been several notable “world computer” projects, each with its own strengths and limitations:
Ethereum: A leading platform for smart contracts and decentralized finance (DeFi), but it struggles with scalability, and privacy features have been added as afterthoughts rather than built-in essentials.
Solana: Often seen as a strong competitor to Ethereum, but like Ethereum, it remains heavily focused on finance and lacks built-in privacy.
Internet Computer (Dfinity): Takes a completely different approach to scaling with its subnet-based model. However, it doesn’t prioritize network or data privacy as a core feature, nor does it use confidential computing to achieve its goals.
IPVM: They’ve shut down. Like Dfinity, IPVM was an open compute platform that didn’t treat network or data privacy as a fundamental component.
What Sets Q Apart?
Q stands out in three key areas: scale, structure, and privacy.
Scale
Q’s scaling design is inspired by the “shared-nothing” architecture used by ScyllaDB, which allows for exceptional horizontal scalability. This means the network can handle massive workloads, such as:
The 200,000 messages per second required by apps like iMessage.
The petabytes of data needed for social media platforms hosting images.
The complex, customizable rules evaluation required by massively multiplayer game engines.
Structure
Q is a complete reinvention of decentralized networks. Structurally, it doesn’t resemble a traditional blockchain. The closest comparison might be the global proof sequencing component, which functions more like a timechain—a term Satoshi Nakamoto originally used to describe Bitcoin’s blockchain. This design allows Q to operate in a fundamentally different way.
Privacy
Q prioritizes privacy at every level:
Traffic anonymization: Similar to Tor, Q ensures that network traffic remains private.
Analytic and transactional privacy: Uses techniques designed to prevent MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) attacks, a problem Ethereum has struggled with.
Input privacy: Achieved through a multi-party confidential compute execution environment, ensuring that data remains secure even during processing.
This article is a summary of an article By: Cassandra Heart, published on the Quilibrium official blog
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