Yesterday, an AWS outage caused the internet to grind to a halt due to an issue at US-EAST-1, a single data centre relied on by companies worldwide. Reddit, Snapchat, Signal, and Facebook were all affected. Online banking and money transfer platforms, including Venmo, Lloyds, and Halifax, could not service customers in the US, Europe, and other regions. Government services were unavailable in many countries, and major telecommunications networks were heavily impacted. But despite being born from the principles of decentralisation, crypto did not fare any better. The world’s biggest exchanges, including Coinbase, experienced intermittent downtime and disruptions. This was not a one-off event. Outages at AWS, Azure, and other tech giants regularly bring down large swathes of our internet because they are the companies that host and route traffic through to almost everything online. Just three companies account for more than 60% of the cloud storage market: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. No matter how private or secure your protocol or platform is, its control rests with somebody else if it is hosted by a centralised cloud giant. If one of these companies has an issue or outage, as they are prone to do, you lose your ability to interact online. The risks around privacy and security are even worse when you consider the potential impact of a data leak or exploitation of user data at these entities. The web was never envisioned to be this centralised, ruled by a few digital barons. The ideal envisioned by its pioneers was to send data between people, distribute the load of hosting, and relay information across a network of actors incentivised not to extract data but to provide secure and reliable network performance. To put the internet back in the hands of its users, we don’t need to fight the tech giants for control of their data centres; we only need to build better tools that let us speak and share directly with each other – privately, anonymously, and securely. That is the vision behind Logos. → A peer-to-peer communications protocol for private, scalable messaging and data transport. → A distributed storage network that is reliable, censorship resistant, and built to endure disruption. → A privacy-preserving blockchain for decentralised organising and governance. With these tools, and working together, we can exit the digital feudalism of the tech barons and craft our own self-governed internet and distributed societies, free from centralised control and designed with our interests and privacy at heart. Help us build a decentralised internet to unlock prosperity for all. Join Logos.

Starting next week, we'll be presenting the work from the Summer of Protocols '24 cohort across a Protocol Symposium & Unconference ☀️ We'll kick things off with an overview session on Sep 17th, then have daily sessions by each research team, wrapping up with a two day protocol-themed unconference on Sep 27 & 28.

Srbijo, Uspeli smo! Volim vas, Nole ❤️ 🥇 ** Dear Serbia, We did it. Love, Nole ❤️🥇