What is the Quantorium?

If you're reading this, you're probably interested in something a bit more concrete than the introduction page of this website, which declares the Quantorium to be an ideological instrument for decentralisation and the meaningful protection of both the security and integrity of our data, as a species. If you want specifics, this post is for you!

The Quantorium is composed of three parts: Lykros, Kolaris, and Miriar. The first of these is designed to protect data security, meaning it makes sure data can't be tampered with, by using cryptography. Essentially, Lykros is an encryption engine on steroids, since it's capable of not only encrypting data, but also authenticating changes to it, and even authenticating changes to who can change it! As a world-first, Lykros is also the only generally-applicable system in existence at the moment that supports cryptographically authenticating the permission to share other permissions.

What the heck does that mean? It means that, if Alice has a secret document she's working on with Chloe, and Chloe wants to share access with Bob so that he can help her write a bit of it, Alice can control whether or not Chloe can share that access. And this isn't some wishy-washy protection enforced by the server: Chloe could send the document to Bob, and he could change it, but his changes would be dead-obvious to be unauthorised, since he couldn't say where he got the write permission from (well, he could say he got it from Chloe, but she didn't have the right to share it, so it's obvious that Bob's changes are fruit of the poisoned tree).

Basically, Lykros allows people to work on data in collaboration with much greater security than they ever could before, but this isn't intended for real-time document editing. The eventual mission of Lykros is to provide a universal toolkit for adding end-to-end encryption and cryptographic verification to every service on the planet. We have seen too many massive data breaches over the years to think this isn't essential by now: companies have a tendency to focus on their core business logic, and that's fine, because it would be a drag on them economically to focus on cryptography and security from the get-go. But, if there's a library you can slap into your code, as a developer, and everything's just suddenly encrypted with minimal effort, we can maybe, just maybe, end up with end-to-end encryption being the norm, rather than the exception. The result? A colossal increase in user privacy and a massive increase in security. If you're a developer, this is great news for anything you're working on that involves user data, and, if you're a user, that's great news for the security of your personal (and impersonal) data. We hope to push a solution for cloud storage on the Quantorium in about a year that will allow users to take advantage of this security much more directly for their own files and data.

Now, all this is well and good, but there's still a fundamental flaw in this if we want to give users extreme security: the server could just censor and delete data arbitrarily. Nearly every company on the planet today stores its users' data in some database on some server in the middle of nowhere, and the only way to be guaranteed that your data aren't going to vanish is to know exactly who manufactured every component of that server, and exactly who has interacted with it over its entire lifetime. That is, unsurprisingly, really hard!

The solution to this is simple, however: decentralise data across not one, not two, but dozens of servers. Kolaris provides a mechanism to do just this by creating a distributed hash table (a common kind of decentralised database) with groundbreaking security through a number of novel mechanisms (which are way too complicated to explain here), and incredible speed. Normally, when you've got a lot of servers storing data, it's tricky to figure out who has the data you want, but Kolaris links redundancy with dimensionality in a highly novel way to make it so that, no matter what data you want to retrieve, you can always figure out where it is just by asking one person, which is the same as the internet today. In other words, there is no sacrifice in time complexity (i.e. how well the time to do something scales as the task gets harder) from using Kolaris.

Even better, Kolaris doesn't just support storage, it also supports computation, allowing you to offload work you want to do to a cluster of nodes, and Kolaris is built so that, when you get the answer back, you can be almost completely certain (in the same way that you can be almost completely certain that you won't fall through the floor in a few minutes: quantum physics says it could happen, but it's unlikely enough that you don't really need to care about it) that it's right. There's even a mechanism to help you convince others that you computed it correctly through Kolaris, which opens up a whole new avenue of possibilities for decentralised technology: you can do a hard computation that takes, say, a day, and then show everyone else your answer, and they don't have to trust you to know it's right. (Programs that can do this are called oracles.)

Finally, Miriar is what ties the Quantorium together by improving the capabilities of Kolaris and greatly enhancing the number of use-cases of the system as a whole. Where Kolaris and Lykros provide secure distributed storage, Miriar provides an immutable ledger. You can think about the difference like this: the point of Kolaris is to store stuff and let you change it later; the point of Miriar is to let you store stuff and refer to it later, in absolute confidence that, even if you're dealing with someone who could bribe hundreds of nodes, your data will still be there. This isn't so much intended for files as things like transactions, and Miriar is what you'll probably be most familiar with if you're coming from the cryptocurrency space, since you can run one on it easily. (Oh, and smart contracts are a piece of cake, and you can write them in whatever language you like.)

However, Miriar also enhances Kolaris with an even more secure (and speedier) routing table, while also providing support for human-readable addresses, like google.com, letting you run fully-fledged websites on the Quantorium! (We'll come back to this in a minute.) This is actually really hard to support, because there's nothing about an address like this that makes it cryptographically valid: I can't be certain that I'm getting the right google.com when I type it into my browser. We can mitigate this problem through Miriar, without resorting to the centralised root certificate authorities that the web uses today (yes, there are a handful of keys that control the security of the entire internet, think about that for a minute).

All in all, these three systems come together to create a decentralised platform for building the technologies of the future, and there is no limit to how they can be used. Let's outline a few things you would be able to do with the Quantorium:

• Secure, fast transactions without trusting any central bank
• Running a website without needing any servers
• Storing your files uncensorably with absolute security
• Executing complex calculations and proving the results to others
• Decentralised asset escrow systems, NFTs, and all the rest of the DeFi paraphernalia that's possible with tools like Ethereum today
• All that, with access to a giant storage and computation network

Essentially, if Ethereum is the world's processor, the Quantorium is the world's server room, replete with a boundless storage system, an infinitely scalable computation framework, and a distributed ledger for securing almost anything, from cryptocurrency to addresses to cat pictures.

The point of all this, at an ideological level, and at a more practical level too, is covered well by the introduction to the Quantorium, but, fundamentally, the Quantorium is supposed to enable a new era of technology, in which, rather than decentralisation being an add-on, it becomes the norm. Imagine if companies could run their apps without running any servers: their users could bring their data, in their own little part of the Quantorium's storage (powered by Kolaris, secured by Lykros), and run computations as necessary, minimising costs by taking the 'serverless' compute model to the nth degree. That would mean companies wouldn't have to pay for infrastructure costs, and users would be billed for exactly what they use. We developed this concept at the same time as another project, the Fula network, and, while they're further ahead than us in their own systems, they're fundamentally tied to blockchain, which we don't think is a good idea in the long-run.

Oh, and we nearly forgot to mention: there is no blockchain here. The Quantorium was built totally from scratch, and we have reinvented both the incentive mechanisms behind blockchain and the technology used to implement it. Rather than tossing up between proof of work and proof of stake, we got rid of the entire concept, and instead moved the elimination of what's called counterparty risk to the client-side: rather than having transaction costs, you just solve a little maths problem instead. (For more technical readers, this uses proof of work as a spam prevention mechanism, it's original intended purpose.) This leads to a far more energy-efficient (and green) network, and one that's more secure too: in Bitcoin, if you want to take control of the network, you need to run 50% of all nodes. In Miriar, whoever starts the network can set that to be...whatever they want. With Miriar, an attacker might have to control 90% of the nodes, an unprecedented level of security.

And that's another thing: the three technologies underlying the Quantorium are completely open-source, and they will be forever. Anyone can use Lykros for their own project, no matter how big or small, and anyone can deploy a miniature (or global-scale) Kolaris network, running Miriar if they want. The Quantorium is both the organisation behind these projects, and the name of what will be the largest network running these three protocols, which we want to become, as we said earlier, the world's server room.

Right now, as you read this, the three technical specifications of exactly how Lykros, Kolaris, and Miriar work have been published, and they can be found here, here, and here respectively. Of course, these need to be implemented in code, and that's what we're working on today. We hope to have a functional network by the end of 2023, but we want to make one thing clear: there will be no cryptocurrency at first. There is no token you can buy up in advance, no stock you can purchase, and nothing else that will make you rich out of this. The entirety of the Quantorium is designed to avoid this kind of scam engineering, and, while we will eventually add support for a cryptocurrency, there will be no such thing in the first version, while we make certain that Lykros and Kolaris can scale, and while we deploy Miriar to aid the two. This tech is really new, and the last thing we want is to have it start gobbling up people's hard-earned savings, only to obliterate them.

If you think all this sounds cool, you can read those specifications if you're into detail (be warned, they aren't friendly little whitepapers, they're hardcore technical specifications designed to tell you how to implement this stuff, so the faint of heart beware!), or you can take a look at our more ideologically-focused introduction, to see why we think all this is so important. For now, the best way you can support us is by signing up to our mailing list, so we can gauge interest in the project, and understand what people most want out of the Quantorium. In the meantime, hold tight while we code this behemoth, and, if you give us your email in the form down below, we'll be in touch!