Cudos

Since the introduction of blockchain technology in 2008, the field has not only become a very active areaof research, but also a financial ecosystem with many opportunities for investors and participants. Mostrecently, DeFi has become its own entity, raising exponentially from just under $700M in January 2020 to over$11B at the end of September. Platforms like Uniswap, Maker or even sudden phenomena like the controversialSushiSwap are revolutionising the ecosystem, and users are benefiting from it.

However, blockchain is still a new technology with limitations. While Ethereum’s journey to overcomescalability issues by using sharding in 2.0 is slow, alternatives such as NEAR Protocol or Polkadot are emerging,but there is no definitive solution yet. Other recent projects like Algorand also offer interesting solutions, butare missing a Turing-complete layer. In a different direction, projects like Chainlink or DIA are creating datafeed oracles, to provide external data to blockchains. Nevertheless, their scope is limited, leaving a space toprovide cost-effective compute for blockchains.

This is where Cudo disrupts the market. Cudo is a company created in 2017 by its current CEO Matt Hawkins,after creating and selling C4L, one of the biggest cloud services providers in the UK. Cudo is a scalablecompute network, which currently offers a professional mining platform for both amateur users andenterprise, supporting GPU, CPU and ASIC mining.

Cudo’s goal is twofold: to provide a secure, Turing-complete layer 2 to blockchains through the CUDOSnetwork, and to provide a cost-effective, low-latency alternative to the main cloud providers, by tapping intothe computing power of data centres, mining farms and the millions of underutilised PC’s, laptops and gamingconsoles. By sharing part of its underlying technology with the CUDOS network, Cudo’s cloud computing caneffectively be understood as blockchain’s layer 3, enabling any kind of workload to be requested from theblockchain and run in a decentralised way using SEV-secured hardware.