Technology

AppleWorldwide Developers Conference is just a couple of days away, but some of the updates appear to have been revealed early.

Specifically, developer Steve Troughton-Smith tweeted some screenshots this morning of what he said was macOS 10.14. And while the screenshots focused on Xcode 10, they also revealed a couple of bigger changes to the operating system.

For one thing, it looks like the new version of macOS will include a more comprehensive dark mode — one that doesn&t just darken the menu bar and the dock, but applies much more broadly, affecting apps and even the Trash can. The screenshots also include an icon for Apple News in the dock, so thereprobably a new desktop version of the app on the way.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Xcode 10 on macOS 10.14. Dark Appearance, Apple News, App Store w/ video previews pic.twitter.com/rJlDy81W4W

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) June 2, 2018

How did Troughton-Smith get ahold of these screenshots He said Apple posted a preview video for Xcode to the Mac App Store API — a video he then shared with 9to5Mac. So it seems the Mac App Store will start include preview videos like this one (the iOS App Store already does).

Ahead of WWDC, there have been rumors that Apple will launch &universal& apps that work on both desktop and mobile. Nothing here confirms that, but it does suggest Apple is working to make iOS and macOS — and their respective App Stores — more similar.

Americamayors have spent the past nine months tripping over each other to curry favor with Amazon.com in its high-profile search for a second headquarters.

More quietly, however, a similar story has been playing out in startup-land. Many of the most valuable venture-backed companies are venturing outside their high-cost headquarters and setting up secondary hubs in smaller cities.

Where are they going Nashville is pretty popular. So is Phoenix. Portland and Raleigh also are seeing some jobs. A number of companies also have a high number of remote offerings, seeking candidates with coveted skills who don&t want to relocate.

Those are some of the findings from aCrunchbase Newsanalysis of the geographic hiring practices ofU.S. unicorns. Since most of these companies are based in high-cost locations, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston and New York, we were looking to see if there is a pattern of setting up offices in smaller, cheaper cities. (For more on survey technique, see Methodology section below.)

Here is a look at some of the hotspots.

Nashville

One surprise finding was the prominence of Nashville among secondary locations for startup offices.

We found at least four unicorns scaling up Nashville offices, plus another three with growing operations in or around other Tennessee cities. Here are some of the Tennessee-loving startups:

When we referred to Nashvillepopularity with unicorns as surprising, that was largely because the city isn&t known as a major hub for tech startups or venture funding. That said, it has a lot of attributes that make for a practical and desirable location for a secondary office.

Nashvilleattractions include highquality of liferatings, a growing population and economy, mild climate and lots of live music. Home prices and overall cost of living are also still far below Silicon Valley and New York, even though the Nashville real estate market has been on a tear for the past several years. An added perk for workers: Tennessee has no income tax on wages.

Phoenix

Phoenix is another popular pick for startup offices, particularly West Coast companies seeking a lower-cost hub for customer service and other operations that require a large staff.

In the chart below, we look at five unicorns with significant staffing in the desert city:

Affordability, ease of expansion and a large employable population look like big factors in Phoenixappeal. Homes and overall cost of living are a lot cheaper than the big coastal cities. And thereplenty of room to sprawl.

Onearticleabout a new office opening also cited low job turnover rates as an attractive Phoenix-area attribute, which is an interesting notion. Startup hubs like San Francisco and New York see a lot of job-hopping, particularly for people with in-demand skill sets. Scaling companies may be looking for people who measure their job tenure in years rather than months.

Those aren&t the only places

Nashville and Phoenix aren&t the only hotspots for unicorns setting up secondary offices. Many other cities are also seeing some scaling startup activity.

Letstart with North Carolina. The Research Triangle region is known for having a lot of STEM grads, so it makes sense that deep tech companies headquartered elsewhere might still want a local base. One such company is cybersecurity unicornTanium, which has a lot of technical job openings in the area. Another isDocker, developer of software containerization technology, which has open positions in Raleigh.

The Orlando metro area stood out mostly due toRobinhood, the zero-fee stock and crypto trading platform that recently hit the $5 billion valuation mark. The Silicon Valley-based company has a significant number of open positions in Lake Mary, an Orlando suburb, including HR and compliance jobs.

Portland, meanwhile, just drew another crypto-loving unicorn, digital currency transaction platformCoinbase. The San Francisco-based company recently opened an office in the Oregon city and is currently in hiring mode.

Anywhere with a screen

But you don&t have to be anywhere in particular to score jobs at many fast-growing startups. A lot of unicorns have a high number of remote positions, including specialized technical roles that may be hard to fill locally.

GitHub, which makes tools developers can use to collaborate remotely on projects, does a particularly good job of practicing what it codes. A notable number of engineering jobs open at the San Francisco-based company are available to remote workers, and other departments also have some openings for telecommuters.

Others with a smattering of remote openings include Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity providerCrowdStrike, enterprise software developerApttus and also Docker.

Not everyone is doing it

Of course, not every unicorn is opening large secondary offices. Many prefer to keep staff closer to home base, seeking to lure employees with chic workplaces and lavish perks. Other companies find that when they do expand, it makes strategic sense to go to another high-cost location.

Still, the secondary hub phenomenon may offer a partial antidote to complaints that a few regions are hogging too much of the venture capital pie. While unicorns still overwhelmingly headquarter in a handful of cities, at least they&re spreading their wings and providing more jobs in other places, too.

Methodology

For this analysis, we were looking at U.S. unicorns with secondary offices in other North American cities. We began with alist of 125U.S.-based companies and looked at open positions advertised on their websites, focusing on job location.

We excluded job offerings related to representing a local market. For instance, a San Francisco company seeking a sales rep in Chicago to sell to Chicago customers doesn&t count. Instead, we looked for openings for team members handling core operations, including engineering, finances and company-wide customer support. We also excluded secondary offices outside of North America.

Additionally, we were looking principally for companies expanding into lower-cost areas. In many cases, we did see companies strategically adding staff in other high-cost locations, such as New York and Silicon Valley.

A final note pertains to Austin, Texas. We did see several unicorns based elsewhere with job openings in Austin. However, we did not include the city in the sections above because Austin, although a lower-cost location than Silicon Valley, may also be characterized as a large, mature technology and startup hub in its own right.

Given all the hype and noise swirling around crypto and decentralized network projects, which runs the full gamut from scams and stupidity, to very clever and inspired ideas, the release of yet another whitepaper does not immediately set off an attention klaxon.

But this whitepaper— which details a new protocol for achieving consensus within a decentralized network — is worth paying more attention to than most.

MaidSafe, the team behind it, are also the literal opposite of fly-by-night crypto opportunists. They&ve been working on decentralized networking since long before the space became the hot, hyped thing it is now.

Their overarching mission is to engineer an entirely decentralized Internet which bakes in privacy, security and freedom of expression by design — the ‘Safe& in their planned ‘Safe Network& stands for ‘Secure access for everyone& — meaning itencrypted, autonomous, self-organizing, self-healing. And the new consensus protocol is just another piece towards fulfilling that grand vision.

Whatconsensus in decentralized networking terms &Within decentralized networks you must have a way of the network agreeing on a state — such as can somebody access a file or confirming a coin transaction, for example — and the reason you need this is because you don&t have a central server to confirm all this to you,& explains MaidSafe COO Nick Lambert, discussing what the protocol is intended to achieve.

&So you need all these decentralized nodes all reaching agreement somehow on a state within the network. Consensus occurs by each of these nodes on the network voting and letting the network as a whole know what it thinks of a transaction.

&Italmost like consensus could be considered the heart of the networks. Itrequired for almost every event in the network.&

We wrote about MaidSafealternative, server-less Internet in 2014. But they actually began work on the project in stealth all the way back in 2006. So they&re over a decade into the R-D at this point.

The network is p2p because itbeing designed so that data is locally encrypted, broken up into pieces and then stored distributed and replicated across the network, relying on the users& own compute resources to stand in and take the strain. No servers necessary.

The prototype Safe Network is currently in an alpha testing stage (they opened for alpha in 2016). Several more alpha test stages are planned, with a beta release still a distant, undated prospect at this stage. But rearchitecting the entire Internet was clearly never going to be a daywork.

MaidSafe also ran a multimillion dollar crowdsale in 2014 — for a proxy token of the coin that will eventually be baked into the network — and did so long before ICOs became a crypto-related bandwagon that all sorts of entities were jumping onto. The SafeCoin cryptocurrency is intended to operate as the inventive mechanism for developers to build apps for the Safe Network and users to contribute compute resource and thus bring MaidSafedistributed dream alive.

Their timing on the token sale front, coupled with prudent hodling of some of the Bitcoins they&ve raised, means they&re essentially in a position of not having to worry about raising more funds to build the network, according to Lambert.

A rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation on MaidSafeoriginal crowdsale suggests, given they raised $2M in Bitcoin in April 2014 when the price for 1BTC was up to around $500, the Bitcoins they obtained then could be worth between ~$30M-$40M by todayBitcoin prices — though that would be assuming they held on to most of them. Bitcoinprice also peaked far higher last year too.

As well as the token sale they also did an equity raise in 2016,via the fintech investment platform bnktothefuture, pulling in around $1.7M from that — in a mixture of cash and &some Bitcoin&.

&Itgone both ways,& says Lambert, discussing the teamluck with Bitcoin. &The crowdsale we were on the losing end of Bitcoin price decreasing. We did a raise from bnktothefuture in autumn of 2016… and fortunately we held on to quite a lot of the Bitcoin. So we rode the Bitcoin price up. So I feel like the universe paid us back a little bit for that. So it feels like we&re level now.&

&Fundraising is exceedingly time consuming right through the organization, and it does take a lot of time away from what you wants to be focusing on, and so to be in a position where you&re not desperate for funding is a really nice one to be in,& he adds. &It allows us to focus on the technology and releasing the network.&

The teamheadcount is now up to around 33, with founding members based at the HQ in Ayr, Scotland, and other engineers working remotely or distributed (including in a new dev office they opened in India at the start of this year), even though MaidSafe is still not taking in any revenue.

This April they also made the decision to switch from a dual licensing approach for their software — previously offering both an open source license and a commercial license (which let people close source their code for a fee) — to going only open source, to encourage more developer engagement and contributions to the project, as Lambert tells it.

&We always see the SafeNetwork a bit like a public utility,& he says. &In terms of once we&ve got this thing up and launched we don&t want to control it or own it because if we do nobody will want to use it — it needs to be seen as everyone contributing. So we felt ita much more encouraging sign for developers who want to contribute if they see everything is fully open sourced and cannot be closed source.&

MaidSafestory so far is reason enough to take note of their whitepaper.

But the consensus issue the paper addresses is also a key challenge for decentralized networks so any proposed solution is potentially a big deal — if indeed it pans out as promised.

Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus

MaidSafe reckons they&ve come up with a way of achieving consensus on decentralized networks thatscalable, robust and efficient. Hence the name of the protocol — ‘Parsec& — being short for: ‘Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus&.

They will be open sourcing the protocol under a GPL v3 license — with a rough timeframe of &months& for that release, according to Lambert.

He says they&ve been working on Parsec for the last 18 months to two years — but also drawing on earlier research the team carried out into areas such as conflict-free replicated data types, synchronous and asynchronous consensus, and topics such as threshold signatures and common coin.

More specifically, the research underpinningParsec is based on the following five papers: 1. Baird L. The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Swirlds Tech Report SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01 (2016); 2. Mostefaoui A., Hamouna M., Raynal M. Signature-Free Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus with t <n/3 and O(n 2 ) Messages, ACM PODC (2014); 3. Micali S. Byzantine Agreement, Made Trivial, (2018);4. Miller A., Xia Y., Croman K., Shi E., Song D. The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols, CCS (2016);5. Team Rocket Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family forCryptocurrencies, (2018).

One tweet responding to the protocolunveiling just over a week ago wonders whether ittoo good to be true. Time will tell — but the potential is certainly enticing.

Bitcoinuse of a drastically energy-inefficient ‘proof of work& method to achieve consensus and write each transaction to its blockchain very clearly doesn&t scale. Itslow, cumbersome and wasteful. And how to get blockchain-based networks to support the billions of transactions per second that might be needed to sustain the various envisaged applications remains an essential work in progress — with projects investigating various ideas and approaches to try to overcome the limitation.

MaidSafenetwork is not blockchain-based. Itengineered to function with asynchronous voting of nodes, rather than synchronous voting, which should avoid the bottleneck problems associated with blockchain. But itstill decentralized. So it needs a consensus mechanism to enable operations and transactions to be carried out autonomously and robustly.Thatwhere Parsec is intended to slot in.

The protocol does not use proof of work. And is able, so the whitepaper claims, to achieve consensus even if a third of the network is comprised of malicious nodes — i.e. nodes which are attempting to disrupt network operations or otherwise attack the network.

Another claimed advantage is that decisions made via the protocol are both mathematically guaranteed and irreversible.

&What Parsec does is it can reach consensus even with malicious nodes. And up to a third of the nodes being malicious is what the maths proofs suggest,& says Lambert. &This ability to provide mathematical guarantees that all parts of the network will come to the same agreement at a point in time, even with some fault in the network or bad actors — thatwhat Byzantine Fault Tolerance is.&

In theory a blockchain using proof of work could be hacked if any one entity controlled 51% of the nodes on the network (although in reality itlikely that such a large amount of energy would be required itpretty much impractical).

So on the surface MaidSafedecentralized network — which ‘only& needs 33% of its nodes to be compromised for its consensus decisions to be attacked — sounds rather less robust. But Lambert says itmore nuanced than the numbers suggest. And in fact the malicious third would also need to be nodes that have the authority to vote. &So it is a third but ita third of well reputed nodes,& as he puts it.

So therean element of proof of stake involved too, bound up with additional planned characteristics of the Safe Network — related to dynamic membership and sharding (Lambert says MaidSafe has additional whitepapers on both those elements coming soon).

&Those two papers, particularly the one around dynamic membership, will explain why having a third of malicious nodes is actually harder than just having 33% of malicious nodes. Because the nodes that can vote have to have a reputation as well. So itnot just purely you can flood the Safe Network with lots and lots of malicious nodes and override it only using a third of the nodes. What we&re saying is the nodes that can vote and actually have a say must have a good reputation in the network,& he says.

&The other thing is proof of stake… Everyone is desperate to move away from proof of work because of its environmental impact. So proof of stake — I liken it to the Scottish landowners, where people with a lot of power have more say. In the cryptocurrency field, proof of stake might be if you have, letsay, 10 coins and I have one coin your vote might be worth 10x as much authority as what my one coin would be. So any of these mechanisms that they come up with it has that weighting to it… So the people with the most vested interests in the network are also given the more votes.&

Sharding refers to closed groups that allow for consensus votes to be reached by a subset of nodes on a decentralized network. By splitting the network into small sections for consensus voting purposes the idea is you avoid the inefficiencies of having to poll all the nodes on the network — yet can still retain robustness, at least so long as subgroups are carefully structured and secured.

&If you do that correctly you can make it more secure and you can make things much more efficient and faster,& says Lambert. &Because rather than polling, letsay 6,000 nodes, you might be polling eight nodes. So you can get that information back quickly.

&Obviously you need to be careful about how you do that because with much less nodes you can potentially game the network so you need to be careful how you secure those smaller closed groups or shards. So that will be quite a big thing because pretty much every crypto project is looking at sharding to make, certainly, blockchains more efficient. And so the fact that we&ll have something coming out in that, after we have the dynamic membership stuff coming out, is going to be quite exciting to see the reaction to that as well.&

Voting authority on the Safe Network might be based on a nodelongevity, quality and historical activity — so a sort of ‘reputation& score (or ledger) that can yield voting rights over time.

&If you&re like that then you will have a vote in these closed groups. And so a third of those votes — and that then becomes quite hard to game because somebody whothen trying to be malicious would need to have their nodes act as good corporate citizens for a time period. And then all of a sudden become malicious, by which time they&ve probably got a vested stake in the network. So it wouldn&t be possible for someone to just come and flood the network with new nodes and then be malicious because it would not impact upon the network,& Lambert suggests.

The computing power that would be required to attack the Safe Network once itpublic and at scale would also be &really, really significant&, he adds. &Once it gets to scale it would be really hard to co-ordinate anything against it because you&re always having to be several hundred percent bigger than the network and then have a co-ordinated attack on it itself. And all of that work might get you to impact the decision within one closed group. So itnot even network wide… And that decision could be on who accesses one piece of encrypted shard of data for example… Even the thing you might be able to steal is only an encrypted shard of something — itnot even the whole thing.&

Other distributed ledger projects are similarly working onAsynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (AFBT) consensus models, including those usingdirected acrylic graphs (DAGs) — another nascent decentralization technology thatbeen suggested as an alternative to blockchain.

And indeed AFBT techniques predate Bitcoin, though MaidSafe says these kind of models have only more recently become viable thanks to research and the relative maturing of decentralized computing and data types, itself as a consequence of increased interest and investment in the space.

However in the case of Hashgraph — the DAG project which has probably attracted the most attention so far — itclosed source, not open. So thatone major difference with MaidSafeapproach.

Another difference that Lambert points to is that Parsec has been built to work in a dynamic, permissionless network environment (essential for the intended use-case, as the Safe Network is intended as a public network). Whereas heclaims Hashgraph has only demonstrated its algorithms working on a permissioned (and therefore private) network &where all the nodes are known&.

He also suggests therea question mark over whether Hashgraphalgorithm can achieve consensus when there are malicious nodes operating on the network. Which — if true — would limit what it can be used for.

&The Hashgraph algorithm is only proven to reach agreement if thereno adversaries within the network,& Lambert claims. &So if everythingrunning well then happy days, but if thereany maliciousness or any failure within that network then — certainly on the basis of whatbeen published — it would suggest that that algorithm was not going to hold up to that.&

&I think being able to do all of these things asynchronously with all of the mathematical guarantees is very difficult,& he continues, returning to the core consensus challenge. &So at the moment we see that we have come out with something that is unique, that covers a lot of these bases, and is a very good use for our use-case. And I think will be useful for others — so I think we like to think that we&ve made a paradigm shift or a vast improvement over the state of the art.&

Paradigm shift vs marginal innovation

Despite the teamconviction that, with Parsec, they&ve come up with something very notable, early feedback includes some very vocal Twitter doubters.

For example therea lengthy back-and-forth between several MaidSafe engineers and Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir — who dubs the Parsec protocol &overhyped& and a &marginal innovation if that&… so, er, ouch.

Lambert is, if not entirely sanguine, then solidly phlegmatic in the face of a bit of initial Twitter blowback — saying he reckons it will take more time for more detailed responses to come, i.e. allowing for people to properly digest the whitepaper.

&In the world of async BFT algorithms, any advance is huge,& MaidSafe CEO David Irvine also tells us when we ask for a response to Zamfircritique. &How huge is subjective, but any advance has to be great for the world. We hope others will advance Parsec like we have built on others (as we clearly state and thank them for their work).So even if it was a marginal development (which it certainly is not) then I would take that.&

&All in all, though, nothing was said that took away from the fact Parsec moves the industry forward,& he adds. &I felt the comments were a bit juvenile at times and a bit defensive (probably due to us not agreeing with POS in our Medium post) but in terms of the only part commented on (the coin flip) we as a team feel that part could be much more concrete in terms of defining exactly how small such random (finite) delays could be. We know they do not stop the network and a delaying node would be killed, but for completeness, it would be nice to be that detailed.&

A developer source of our own in the crypto/blockchain space — whonot connected to the MaidSafe or Ethereum projects — also points out that Parsec &getting objective review will take some time given that so many potential reviewers have vested interest in their own project/coin&.

Itcertainly fair to say the space excels at public spats and disagreements. Researchers pouring effort into one project can be less than kind to rivals& efforts. (And, well, given all the crypto Lambos at stake itnot hard to see why there can be no love lost — and, ironically, zero trust — between competing champions of trustless tech.)

Another fundamental truth of these projects is they&re all busily experimenting right now, with lots of ideas in play to try and fix core issues like scalability, efficiency and robustness — often having different ideas over implementation even if rival projects are circling and/or converging on similar approaches and techniques.

&Certainly other projects are looking at sharding,& says Lambert. &So I know that Ethereum are looking at sharding. And I think Bitcoin are looking at that as well, but I think everyone probably has quite different ideas about how to implement it. And of course we&re not using a blockchain which makes that another different use-case where Ethereum and Bitcoin obviously are. But everyone has — as with anything — these different approaches and different ideas.&

&Every network will have its own different ways of doing [consensus],& he adds when asked whether he believes Parsec could be adopted by other projects wrestling with the consensus challenge. &So itnot like some could lift [Parsec] out and just put it in. Ethereum is blockchain-based — I think they&re looking at something around proof of stake, but maybe they could take some ideas or concepts from the work that we&re open sourcing for their specific case.

&If you get other blockchain-less networks like IOTA, Byteball, I think POA is another one as well. These other projects it might be easier for them to implement something like Parsec with them because they&re not using blockchain. So maybe less of that adaption required.&

Whether other projects will deem Parsec worthy of their attention remains to be seen at this point with so much still to play for. Some may prefer to expend effort trying to rubbish a rival approach, whose open source tech could, if it stands up to scrutiny and operational performance, reduce the commercial value of proprietary and patented mechanisms also intended to grease the wheels of decentralized networks — for a fee.

And of course MaidSafedeveloped-in-stealth consensus protocol may also turn out to be a relatively minor development. But finding a non-vested expert to give an impartial assessment of complex network routing algorithms conjoined to such a self-interested and, frankly, anarchical industry is another characteristic challenge of the space.

Irvineview is that DAG based projects which are using a centralized component will haveto move on or adopt what he dubs &state of art& asynchronous consensus algorithms — as MaidSafe believes Parsec is — aka, algorithms which are &more widely accepted and proven&.

&So these projects should contribute to the research, but more importantly, they will have to adopt better algorithms than they use,& he suggests. &So they can play an important part, upgrades! How to upgrade a running DAG based network How to had fork a graph etc.We know how to hard fork blockchains, but upgrading DAG based networks may not be so simple when they are used as ledgers.

&Projects like Hashgraph, Algorand etc will probably use an ABFT algorithm like this as their whole network with a little work for a currency; IOTA, NANO, Bytball etc should. That is entirely possible with advances like Parsec. However adding dynamic membership, sharding, a data layer then a currency is a much larger proposition, which is why Parsec has been in stealth mode while it is being developed.

&We hope that by being open about the algorithm, and making the code open source when complete, we will help all the other projects working on similar problems.&

Of course MaidSafeteam might be misguided in terms of the breakthrough they think they&ve made with Parsec. But itpretty hard to stand up the idea they&re being intentionally misleading.

Because, well, what would be the point of that While the exact depth of MaidSafefunding reserves isn&t clear, Lambert doesn&t sound like a startup guy with money worries. And the teamstaying power cannot be in doubt — over a decade into the R-D needed to underpin their alt network.

Ittrue that being around for so long does have some downsides, though. Especially, perhaps, given how hyped the decentralized space has now become. &Because we&ve been working on it for so long, and itbeen such a big project, you can see some negative feedback about that,& as Lambert admits.

And with such intense attention now on the space, injecting energy which in turn accelerates ideas and activity, thereperhaps extra pressure on a veteran player like MaidSafe to be seen making a meaningful contribution — ergo, it might be tempting for the team to believe the consensus protocol they&ve engineered really is a big deal.

To stand up and be counted amid all the noise, as it were. And to draw attention to their own project — which needs lots of external developers to buy into the vision if itto succeed, yet, here in 2018, itjust one decentralization project among so many.

The Safe Network roadmap

Consensus aside, MaidSafebiggest challenge is still turning the sizable amount of funding and resources the teamideas have attracted to date into a bona fide alternative network that anyone really can use. And therea very long road to travel still on that front, clearly.

The Safe Network is in alpha 2 testing incarnation (which has been up and running since September last year) — consisting of around a hundred nodes that MaidSafe is maintaining itself.

The core decentralization proposition of anyone being able to supply storage resource to the network via lending their own spare capacity is not yet live — and won&t come fully until alpha 4.

&People are starting to create different apps against that network. So we&ve seen Jams — a decentralized music player… There are a couple of storage style apps… There is encrypted email running as well, and also that is running on Android,& says Lambert. &And we have a forked version of the Beaker browser — thatthe browser that we use right now. So if you can create websites on the Safe Network, which has its own protocol, and if you want to go and view those sites you need a Safe browser to do that, so we&ve also been working on our own browser from scratch that we&ll be releasing later this year… So therea number of apps that are running against that alpha 2 network.

&What alpha 3 will bring is it will run in parallel with alpha 2 but it will effectively be a decentralized routing network. What that means is it will be one for more technical people to run, and it will enable data to be passed around a network where anyone can contribute their resources to it but it will not facilitate data storage. So it&ll be a command line app, which is probably why it&ll suit technical people more because there&ll be no user interface for it, and they will contribute their resources to enable messages to be passed around the network. So secure messaging would be a use-case for that.

&And then alpha 4 is effectively bringing together alpha 2 and alpha 3. So it adds a storage layer on top of the alpha 3 network — and at that point it gives you the fully decentralized network where users are contributing their resources from home and they will be able to store data, send messages and things of that nature. Potentially during alpha 4, or a later alpha, we&ll introduce test SafeCoin. Which is the final piece of the initial puzzle to provide incentives for users to provide resources and for developers to make apps. So thatprobably what the immediate roadmap looks like.&

On the timeline front Lambert won&t be coaxed into fixing any deadlines to all these planned alphas. They&ve long ago learnt not to try and predict the pace of progress, he says with a laugh. Though he does not question that progress is being made.

&These big infrastructure projects are typically only government funded because the payback is too slow for venture capitalists,& he adds. &So in the past you had things like Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet — that was obviously a US government funded project — and so we&ve taken on a project which has, not grown arms and legs, but certainly theremore to it than what was initially thought about.

&So we are almost privately funding this infrastructure. Which is quite a big scope, and I will say why ittaking a bit of time. But we definitely do seem to be making lots of progress.&