Is the internet about to be disrupted by a little-known tech company from Ayr?

Is the internet about to be disrupted by a little-known tech company from Ayr?

David Irvine, founder of Maidsafe, announced the arrival of the Autonomi Network. Photograph: Joe Dorfman

Kevin O'Sullivan, January 7, 2025 4 min read

After 18 years of development a tech company based in Ayr is about to disrupt the internet by finally launching its ‘quantum secure fully autonomous network’.

Maidsafe, founded by David Irvine in 2006, is set to unveil its long-awaited vision of the future at the end of this month, as details emerged today of its Autonomi platform.

Following months of testing the new network is now ready to be shared with web users around the world, in the hope that they will choose a platform where their data is never hosted by a corporate server.

Instead, the decentralised network is run by millions of everyday devices, to host quantum secure, encrypted data permanently, protecting privacy and user control.

When you use the network to store some data it is split into ‘chunks’. Each chunk is securely encrypted with a set of credentials that are only known by the creator— who has the keys to unlock the data and reassemble it into information again.

These credentials never touch the internet.

Data ‘chunks’ are then sent to the network, duplicated several times for extra security, and dispersed evenly and randomly across the globe, along with a map of where they are and how to reassemble them. Once again this is securely encrypted and only accessible to the holder of the keys.

The encrypted data chunks are held by a multitude of everyday devices, called nodes, each offering a small portion of their spare, under-utilised capacity, to securely hold a small collection of encrypted data chunks, serving them back to their owner when asked.

The internet, with its scroll, click or voice command functionality has collected a vast amount of information, with users giving access to device data, sensory data, interaction data, personal data, online activity data, communication data, network and device data, behavioural data … and transactional data, to further improve their experience.

Irvine argues that while the increasing amount of connectivity, accessibility and data history is beneficial, that there is also a downside to the intuitive, convenient and information rich world that we live in. As AI becomes more integrated into our daily lives, there is an increasing risk of harm. MaidSafe’s deployment of the SAFE Network, now known as ‘Autonomi’, seeks to address that.

MaidSafe CEO, Sarah Buxton, said: “Losing our personal and private data to AI, may also lead to the reduction and removal of our freedoms. Not just through (even ‘well meaning’) regulations and censorship, but through a genuinely dystopian ability for a select few to manipulate, coerce and create a reality that’s derived from application owners and AI design.”

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The Autonomi Network is designed with AI and Robotics in mind. A decentralised and highly distributed infrastructure that removes hosting and subscription costs for application developers – and enables users to benefit from a level of privacy previously associated with hosting files locally on a PC at home.

“With controlled AI, it’s no longer shopping that is the worry, it’s potentially civilisation wide control, and we won’t even know it’s happening,” he says. “It’s no longer a trivial thing we can sell for convenience, this is a threat to a species like none seen before.”

Eighteen years of development has now culminated in the network being publicly released later this month, with developer programs and hosting incentives, for those running nodes, also going live.

When asked how a network like Autonomi compares with edge computing, Buxton said: “While ‘edge computing’ plays a role in trying to distribute computational resources, to improve latency and bandwidth, it doesn’t inherently solve our data privacy issues.

“If data needs to move between nodes or to the cloud for further utility then it still risks the potential of exposure and interception. Edge compute also, while being closer to the data source, doesn’t guarantee where or how data is ultimately stored – that’s especially worrisome if third parties are involved”.

The release of Autonomi will bring with it access to a decentralised internet layer, an infrastructure that can be run by millions of commodity devices.

The network will not impose any licenses, subscriptions or ongoing hosting fees, and the only cost associated with storing data on Autonomi will be a one-time payment, received by those hosting data through the running of a node.

Once live, Irvine’s MaidSafe will no longer have ownership or control over the network; any IP as well as the custodial duty of network maintenance and improvements will be transferred to the non-profit Swiss entity, known as ‘The Autonomi Foundation’.

For further information read the company’s white paper here.

https://futurescot.com/is-the-internet-about-to-be-disrupted-by-a-little-known-tech-company-from-ayr/

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