Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio announces massive blockchain project Andiami

by Arthur · November 7, 2022

The founding of Ethereum is the stuff of legend. The story, recounted in several books, turns on a motley group of programmers who built on a white paper written by 19-year-old genius Vitalik Buterin and, after much drama and chaos, created the most popular blockchain in the world. Two of the early collaborators, Gavin Wood and Charles Hoskinson, would later turn on Buterin and launch rivals to Ethereum – Polkadot and Cardano respectively – and now another co-founder is launching a massive blockchain project of his own – but one he says is complementary. to Ethereum and will promote decentralization.

The new project, Andiami, is the brainchild of Anthony Di Iorio, who like Buterin hails from Toronto and is best known for funding Ethereum in its infancy. Today, Di Iorio is rich thanks to the proceeds of his early stake in Ethereum and other crypto investments, and if his new venture succeeds, it could be a key pillar in achieving the elusive goal of a decentralized internet known as Web3.

‘Let’s Go Together’

On Monday night, as part of the W3B summit kick-off, Di Iorio took a stage in downtown Toronto to formally announce Andiami — an Italian word he coined that translates as “Let’s go together.” The project launch will be a multi-year affair involving tokens and a new protocol, but at its core it will involve sending 3,000 console units known as Cubes to people around the world who will be randomly selected from a whitelist.

In an interview with Fortuneexplained Di Iorio that the Cubes, which he describes as Xbox-like devices, will be fundamental to solving what he believes are the two major problems hindering Web3: the paradox of centralized decentralization and the persistence of Web2 business models.

The term “centralized decentralization” refers to the phenomenon that key components of Ethereum, which are nominally intended to be free of any central authority, are increasingly run by a handful of large players. These include Alchemy and Infura, which provide infrastructure that helps businesses interact with the blockchain, and more recently the likes of Coinbase and Lido, which are responsible for validating transactions under Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake system. Meanwhile, these major players rely on the centralized servers of Web2 behemoths like Amazon and Google to run their operations.

Di Iorio believes the solution to this is to empower individuals to replace these centralized blockchain actors by deploying their own hardware – hence the Cubes, which will act as decentralized servers capable of storing 12 terabytes of data and which will be able to interact with all major blockchains, storing copies of ledger history and validating transactions.

“The cubes will be plug-and-play full nodes with indexed blockchain data for any chain,” explains Di Iorio. “You can’t have a user-controlled internet if the user doesn’t have his own server.”

To promote decentralization further, he says that those who sign up will not need to provide any identifying information beyond a first name. He suggests that those selected to receive one use a post office box and says Andiami will then destroy this information to preserve anonymity.

The Cubes, and accompanying kits, will sell on a sliding scale from $300 to $5,000 with the cheaper ones intended for low-income participants — part of Di Iorio’s plan to cut out the venture capitalists who, he says, have been major contributors to centralization in the blockchain realm .

Tokens, a mission game, a long-term rollout

Di Iorio, like many in the crypto community, is a lifelong fan of games and puzzles, so it’s no surprise that Andiami has a heavy gaming element. Those who first sign up for a cube will receive a “Quest for Liberty” kit that requires them to solve a series of physical and digital puzzles to receive “Digital Life Tokens.”

The tokens will be used in the economy of a future node sharing protocol that Andiami is building, allowing holders to participate in a marketplace to allocate resources to various blockchain operations. Kube owners, who will connect to each other via the future protocol, will eventually receive tokens as a reward for hosting and sharing node data.

Di Iorio told Fortune that Andiami has not decided on the nature of the tokens, but that they will still come in the form of a so-called Layer 2 built on top of Ethereum.

Cube owners will also receive a physical authentication chip that, along with their phones, will serve as proof of ownership and identity – a feature Andiami calls “NFPs” for non-fungible phygitals.

As mentioned, all of this is a hugely ambitious undertaking, even by the standards of blockchain projects. For this reason, Di Iorio has given himself a long timeline, with the tokens planned for distribution in late 2023 and the cubes to arrive as late as late 2024.

Of course, it’s too early to know if all of this – or any of it – will come to fruition, although Di Iorio certainly has the resources to try. It’s also worth noting that the projects launched by his compatriots from Ethereum’s early days, Hoskinson and Wood, now have multi-billion dollar valuations. It is not out of the question that Andiami can one day achieve the same.