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Introducing Fleek Network & Fleek.xyz ⚡️

We’re closing out 2022 with not one, not two, but three big announcements:

  1. We’ve just completed a $25M Series A led by Polychain and key backers in the decentralized storage ecosystem.
  2. We’re announcing Fleek Network to patch a missing piece of the web3 infra stack - content delivery.
  3. We’re announcing a brand new Fleek platform to be THE development platform for web3 - protocol agnostic, non-custodial, and open-source.

Before we dive in and examine all three in detail, here's an action list for the eager:

Without further ado, let’s dive in! ⚡️


Fleek Network - Supercharging Web3 Content

Our team is going all in on building a key piece of missing infrastructure, not just for our own hosting and storage stack, but for all of web3, and we're calling it Fleek Network.

THE WHAT

Fleek Network is a lightning fast decentralized content and application delivery network that will supercharge the delivery of all web3 content and apps. As a trustless, censorship-resistant, open-source CDN, anyone will have the ability to contribute bandwidth to the network by running a cache node.

Fleek Network is origin agnostic, meaning it can accelerate content from any underlying storage protocol or provider, and the usage of the network will be fully transparent and publicly available for the world to leverage. All content will be IPLD-based and content addressable, creating a public record of the world’s bandwidth and content being served, much like how smart contracts bring radical transparency to financial transactions.

We’re incredibly proud of the technical architecture of Fleek Network, and are already seeing impressive performance metrics in testing (ex. 15-20ms TTFB). We firmly believe that Fleek Network will be as good, if not better, than existing CDN’s from a cost, performance/latency, and throughput perspective, while staying true to the decentralization/web3 benefits that significantly differentiate Fleek Network from other CDN’s.

WHY

Using fleek network protect with web3 promotional banner

Fleek Network is a huge missing piece of a true web3 future.

Currently, the majority of popular web3 apps and use cases (and storage protocols/service providers) use Cloudflare for accelerating their app and content. That’s because above all else, users will not tolerate slow loading apps/content.

However, the problem is that web3 protocols don’t incentivize performant delivery of content directly from their networks, so everyone is forced to stick to a performant cache layer (ex. Cloudflare) in between all these protocols and their apps.

The solution? Fleek Network, built for anyone who wants both fast, and trustless content acceleration. Period.

But Fleek Network isn’t just for web3. It’s origin agnostic, meaning that web2 can also enjoy the benefits of Fleek Network (both cost and performance benefits alone should make it quite attractive compared to existing CDN’s).

HOW

We’ve banded some of the decentralized storage OG’s like IPFS, Filecoin, and Arweave together to back our vision (+ invest in our Series A) to become the content acceleration layer for ALL of web3.

It’s a win-win for all! Storage protocols can continue building key storage infrastructure without worrying about delivery, and users can build web3 apps knowing their content and apps will perform as well as web2 apps, without risk of being deplatformed, censored, or facing any other pitfalls of using corporate owned infrastructure/cloud services.


Hello Fleek.xyz - A Next-Gen Platform For Web3 Development

Secondly, we’re also announcing Fleek.xyz, a new Fleek platform that we’ve been working on in parallel to Fleek Network. More than just a domain migration, you can view Fleek.xyz as an evolution to our legacy (fleek.co) platform.

At its core, Fleek.xyz will be an open source, blockchain agnostic, extensible web3 development platform that provides familiar products, features and developer experiences that leverage different web3 protocols and primitives.

With Fleek.xyz developers can pick and choose individual services that best suit their needs – discard the rest! Utilize our services independently through our CLI, SDK, and open API or keep it simple and use our official UI.

While this is still the early days for Fleek.xyz, we’ve put a lot of thought into some of the project’s core pillars that we’re excited about.

Decouple Everything

Fleek has never been a single monolithic service and its architecture should reflect that.

Different from our previous platform, Fleek.xyz decouples all of our services so that they are independent from each other. This not only means that they can be developed in isolation internally (parallelization ftw!), it also means that they can be utilized in isolation.

Need to manage your IPNS, but not looking for hosting? No problem, interact directly with our IPNS service via the CLI, SDK, or open API. Same goes for all of our other services.

Deliver Fast & Iterate Faster

In this evolving landscape that is web3, we need to make sure we’re able to deliver value to our users as fast as possible to ensure we are meeting expectations and hitting the nail on the features that we are adding.

By decoupling all services we can move quickly, stay agile and remove interdependencies that will supercharge our teams to iterate on existing services and expand into potential new services like compute, server-side rendering, databases, and others. We are currently working with several cool new protocols to build new products/features/services that will be surfaced in Fleek.

Our beta program (coming soon) will allow us to ship new features to a group of users to get their inputs, facilitating growth in a more sustainable way. We want to make sure that feedback is introduced as early as possible in our development process.

Allow Anyone to Extend Functionality

Better ideas pop up on people's heads anytime all around the world, so we decided to empower those people that have the will to improve the web3 space within the new Fleek.xyz platform.

We want to create an ecosystem for developers that will allow them to expand the realm of possibilities of what you can do with our services and the Fleek.xyz platform. We want anyone to be able to build new services leveraging any underlying web3 protocols or projects, and surface that functionality for any Fleek user to leverage.

By isolating developments and creating easy-to-use tools to connect them together we are sure that new user built features that we haven't thought of will appear and dominate.

More info on the extensibility of the new Fleek.xyz platform, how ‘Services’ within the new platform work, how to build them, etc. will be shared in the coming weeks leading up to the public launch of Fleek.xyz in early 2023.


It’s been real, Fleek.co! 👋

Over the next few months we’ll continue adding new features to the Fleek.xyz platform until feature parity is reached with the current platform.

Following feature parity we will sunset the old Fleek.co platform. Don’t worry, this process will be super easy.

More incremental updates to come soon (or just sign up for our mailing list)!


Roadmap

Get ready for a 🔥 2023 year from Fleek.

Fleek Roadmap details introducing banner

Note: this does not include a roadmap for Fleek Network, more on that in the coming weeks.


Now that the cat is out of the bag, we couldn’t be more stoked! Next year will be an action packed and exciting one for Fleek. We are on a mission to build the web3 development platform of the future for our community, with our community. ⚡️

P.s. All communications with our community will now also come from our new fleek.xyz domain, so watch out for those emails in your inbox!