At matrixD, our Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to enable the creation of a decentralized internet, where content is shared directly between trusted endpoints as opposed to an ever growing centralized server farm.

Internet traffic is growing by leaps and bounds every year as consumers and businesses find new ways of consuming content. However, a significant portion of this traffic consists of duplicate content being downloaded by billions of endpoints around the world. For example, trending videos and songs are downloaded across millions of laptops, phones, and other streaming devices. iOS and Android app store content is downloaded by millions of mobile phones and computers.

On the business side, docker images and other dependencies are downloaded repeatedly on developer laptops & CI/CD machines as software organizations shift left, consuming a significant chunk of an organization’s available bandwidth.

A small set of sources, i.e. central servers and CDNs, are responsible for meeting these demand bursts since trust is only established between the source that owns the content and each recipient/subscriber. This is hugely inefficient for a couple of reasons:

• Organizations that host content downloaded by a large number of subscribers incur high egress costs and increasing infrastructure costs with more hardware, geo-distributed mirrors, and CDNs to meet demand and latency expectations.

• Organizations that have a large number of endpoints downloading duplicate content incur a “cost of bandwidth” to support these downloads. Also, each endpoint pays a “cost of latency” since this content is downloaded from the internet.

At matrixD, we are on a mission to help optimize these scenarios, whether you’re hosting or downloading a large amount of content.

If this sounds interesting, we’d love to hear from you!