Nion network

Decentralized Cloud Infrastructure

Nion is a blockchain based cloud infrastructure for the future of Web3.
With a lightweight protocol it aims to build a decentralized and global network for IoT and Edge computing applications, optimising network's resource allocation in a transparent and verifiable way.

Join our telegram channel and contribute to Nion.

Nion Network Litepaper v1.1

Features

Decentralized cloud

Community driven decentralized, and opensource cloud computing architecture for the Web3.

Developer oriented

Docker support enabling support for a variety of tech stacks, environments, and languages.

Transparent and verifiable

Onchain transparency and verifiability of running applications, migrations, and resource allocations.

Stake and Earn

Stake to run a node, and contribute computational underutilized computational power, and bandwidth. Earn rewards!

Deploy and run applications

Package your stateless applications in a docker image, and deploy instance on the network in a frictionless way.

Autonomous orchestration

Configure strategies for the decentralized orchestrator to take care of the life-cycle of your application.

Showcase

Testnet is up and running!

Dev-net deployments are monitored with the usage of a Grafana dashboard. Custom plugins were built to visualize the consensus, and networking layer.

The protocol is still under heavy development and dev-net deployments are expected to go offline and be redeployed on a regular basis.

A public view is available at:

Testnet dashboard

Articles & News

Medium Articles highlighting the core technology behind Nion.

News and medium articles

Stay Informed and Inspired: Explore the Latest News and Articles!

Year in review — 2022

by nion | 23. Jul 2023 | year in review, research, innovations

In the "Year in Review 2022" article, we delve into the Nion protocol's journey, a secure and scalable solution for decentralized infrastructure. Our dedicated team worked on key improvements, focusing on networking enhancements, verifiable delay functions, and efficient application migration using CRIU. As we set our sights on the future, we continue to push the horizons of decentralized technology through innovative research and development.

P2P Networking in NION

by aleksandar | 30. Aug 2021 | blockchain, p2p

Nion Network is introducing P2P networking capabilities to enhance its blockchain scalability. The traditional flood-based algorithm, though simple, can result in redundant network utilization and slow information dissemination. Nion Network is implementing a new algorithm that utilizes proof of stake and a binary tree structure for routing messages, resulting in faster and more secure transactions. This new feature also allows for increased privacy as nodes can transact directly without intermediaries. Join the Nion Network community to experience the future of decentralized finance with this innovative technology.

Nion Network — The Genesis

by nion | 20. Jul 2021 | genesis, blockchain

Nion Network is a revolutionary new blockchain platform that aims to address key issues in the decentralized space, including language heterogeneity, resource allocation, and verifiability. The platform utilizes a permissioned blockchain with a federated vote-based consensus mechanism, where nodes not only contribute to security and consensus but also share their resources by running containerized applications. The new version of Nion Network will be a permissionless network with Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, stateful container migration and fixed network parameters. Join the Nion Network community and be a part of a more efficient, decentralized world.

Research papers

Dive into the World of Innovation: Explore our Research Papers on Nion Network's Revolutionary Technology and Protocol

Run-time application migration using checkpoint/restore in userspace

Status: Pending peer review

This paper presents an empirical study on the feasibility of using Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace (CRIU) for run-time application migration between hosts, with a particular focus on edge computing and cloud infrastructures. The paper provides experimental support for CRIU in Docker and offers insights into the impact of application memory usage on checkpoint size, time, and resources. Through a series of tests, we find that the time to checkpoint is linearly proportional to the size of the memory allocation of the container, while the restore is less so. Our findings contribute to the understanding of CRIU's performance and its potential use in edge computing scenarios. To obtain accurate and meaningful findings, we monitored system telemetry while using CRIU to observe its impact on the host machine's CPU and RAM. Although our results may not be groundbreaking, they offer a good overview and a technical report on the feasibility of using CRIU on edge devices. This study's findings and experimental support for CRIU in Docker could serve as a useful reference for future research on performance optimization and application migration using CRIU.

Authors: Aleksandar Tošić (FAMNIT UP; InnoRenew CoE)

A Blockchain Protocol for Real-Time Application Migration on the Edge

Publisher: MDPI (May 2023)

Authors: Aleksandar Tošić (InnoRenew CoE; FAMNIT UP), Jernej Vičič (InnoRenew CoE; FAMNIT UP), Michael Burnard (InnoRenew CoE; UP IAM), Michael Mrissa (InnoRenew CoE; UP IAM)

Visualization of consensus mechanisms in PoS based blockchain protocols

Publisher: Institute Jožef Štefan, University of Ljubljana (November 2022)

Authors: Aleksandar Tošić (UP FAMNIT; InnoRenew CoE), Daniil Baldouski (UP FAMNIT)

A Decentralized Authoritative Multiplayer Architecture for Games on the Edge

Publisher: Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Science (November 2021)

Authors: Aleksandar Tošić (UP IAM; InnoRenew CoE), Jernej Vičič (UP IAM; ISJFR SAZU)

A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Self-balancing Architecture for the Web of Things

Publisher: Springer (September 2019)

Authors: Aleksandar Tošić (InnoRenew CoE; FAMNIT UP), Jernej Vičič (FAMNIT UP) and Michael Mrissa (InnoRenew CoE; FAMNIT UP)

Roadmap

Nion is currently under heavy development. The current protocol implementation is tailored for a permissioned mode, and does not address byzantine behaviour. Protocol changes for a permissionless setting await a peer reviewed academic paper on the proposed changes.

2017

Initial idea, research and prototyping

The idea of an autonomous and decentralized orchestration
Verifiable delay function-based consensus roles

2018

First implementation, feasibility study

Java based implementation of the protocol
Testing feasibility, speed and responsiveness of container migrations

2019

Reimplementation aiming for production quality codebase

Kotlin implementation, more stability and documentation
Better message queue implementation, added UDP based messages and improved block propagation
Skip block implementation to recover from faults

2020

Permissioned version complete. Container migrations stable

Preparing an article for peer reviewed journal to validate the theoretical foundations of the protocol
Continuing research into CRIU for stateful container migrations
Optimization of attestation propagation using clustering techniques

2021

Move to a permissionless protocol

Protocol reliability improvements for various hardware
Optimised node software for hosts, low resource footprint
Developed custom plugins for visualising network telemetry and debugging

2022

Mainnet preparations

Published peer reviewed scientific paper of the main protocol
Implemented new gossip protocol using r-narry trees (pending peer review)
Major improvements on block times due to efficient propagation

Working on...

2023

Phase 1

Public testnet
Improved algorithm for migrations
Local database implementation for persistence
Client application for submitting containers
Node WebRTC needed for client application
Legal

2024

Phase 1

Quorum for trusted computation
Parent image for user-defined containers
User guide to building images and deploying containers
Add network state and other telemetry to client application
Research on testnet performance

Phase 2

Implement added reliability via redundancy by adding new consensus roles
User configurable fault tolerance (redundancy factor)
Updates to client application to support redundancy
Research on economic model

Phase 3

User configurable orchestration algorithm
Client 2.0 with support of new features
Test persistence of low level sockets on migrating applications (CRIU)
Implementation of protocol level economics
Research towards game theoretical trusted computation

Phase 4

Begin work on DDNS implementation for better name resolution and routing
Work on improved network proxying for migrating application
Stability improvements
Support for native GPU computing and Keras
Study viability of enterprise version
Geo-sharding
Geo-fencing