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Introduction to Ramo

Understanding the dynamics of today’s internet infrastructure​

Today, most of the world’s public cloud infrastructure is controlled by a few large organizations. Fundamentally, these companies succeed because they provide a highly convenient service at competitive prices relative to alternative options (e.g., on-premises infrastructure).

Specifically, these so-called hyperscalers abstract away much of the complexity of running compute and storage infrastructure with powerful tooling. Examples of these tools are DynamoDB, Lambda functions, managed Kubernetes clusters and other products specialized in a particular usage pattern. Each of the cloud providers has its own versions of these products designed for their specific infrastructure environment.

Additionally, the immense size of their operations and the ability to leverage economies of scale allows these companies to offer access to their infrastructure and products at competitive prices. Taken together, these elements empower their customers to build monetizable products and services that can easily, cost-efficiently and performantly scale up or down.

On the flip side, these same customers end up being locked into using a particular set of proprietary products. This is due to the fact that these products, while powerful, are often only interoperable with the infrastructure of one company, which makes them very hard to migrate away from.

These dynamics have resulted in a fairly oligopolistic structure of the public cloud today. It is characterized by high barriers to entry for new players, a slowed down pace of innovation and artificially inflated prices stemming from a lack of competition. The concentration of critical infrastructure in the hands of a few large corporations also represents centralized points of failure and gives some governments power over citizens far outside their jurisdictions.

Leveraging technology to transition to an open cloud architecture​

Web3 has the potential to change things up and replace the centralized cloud with open access protocols. In the context of web3, tools that are functionally equivalent to those offered by the centralized cloud today are defined as protocols. They are typically designed for a set of specific use cases (e.g., storage, video encoding etc.), have protocol-specific incentives and validation mechanisms and provide rails that facilitate the payments between users and providers of the services.

Importantly, these protocols are open allowing an arbitrary number and type of providers to participate so long as they can correctly execute the workloads specified by the protocol. To guarantee a minimal quality of service from providers, the protocols often require providers to commit and lock some collateral, which is forfeited if they fail to execute the workload as specified by the protocol. This mechanism replaces the need for SLAs and ensures that the underlying economies are sustainable.

Thanks to the open nature of these networks, the total capacity of open access infrastructure networks is expected to (eventually) eclipse the size of that of any centralized entity as many providers can come together to form one large network. Additionally, because of the competitiveness between the many providers contributing to these networks, it is expected that prices will become more and more competitive for consumers as provider margins converge to zero.

In sum, web3 networks appear to be well suited to foster the emergency of a more resilient, open and performant web guarded against the risks of vendor lock-in, inflated prices and other drawbacks of centralized solutions. This provides a long term fundamental unfair advantage for web3 to capture most of the world’s demand for compute, a market estimated to be >$1T in value and growing >15% per year fueled by trends such as AI, IoT, AR/VR, video streaming, autonomous vehicles and more.

Ramo: An open access cloud network that anyone can contribute to or use​

The Ramo Network exists to catalyze the transition away from proprietary cloud infrastructure and tooling to open compute protocols. It coordinates liquidity from stakers and hardware provided by various entities across the globe to attract and execute arbitrary types and amounts of computational workloads from web3 compute protocols.

  1. Hardware owners benefit by tapping into a steady flow of monetizable workloads from various networks using Ramo Computer. The ability to market their services to paying clients (e.g., hard drives for storage, circuits for computational workloads and networking equipment to move data) allows them to rapidly and efficiently monetize their assets without having to rely on block rewards to fund their operations. At the same time, providers do not need to manage the complexity of being a provider across several networks.

  2. Stakers, who delegate their tokens to hardware owners via Ramo Staking, benefit by being able to capture most of the block rewards that fuel the growth of various compute protocol economies – especially since providers no longer solely rely on block rewards to fund their operations. Staking their tokens thereby reduces stakers’ exposure to the effects of dilution stemming from the inflation of the compute protocol tokens they own. At the same time, they do not have to deal with the technically complex and capital-intensive process of committing hardware to crypto-network in order to earn rewards. Access becomes democratized.

  3. Ramo Cloud Services users benefit by tapping into an open access network of infrastructure where independent providers compete to deliver the best service at the lowest cost. This decentralized approach ensures resilience and avoids vendor lock-in.

  4. Compute protocol developers can launch with immediate scale and without managing the complexity of bootstrapping their own network by tapping into Ramo’s large and existing network of protocol-agnostic hardware providers using the Ramo SDK. This allows developers to focus on defining the workload and their validation as well as building a sound crypto-economy during the delicate launch period and using rewards emitted by their network in the most optimal way.