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Quilibrium

About Quilibrium and Components

In the sections after "What is Quilibrium?", Q's underlying architectural components are explained in two ways - in terms a five year old can understand (no math, just metaphors), but we'll also step it up in accuracy to a level a high schooler could also understand (algebra, a bit intermediate but with effort can be understood). There will be two pages named ELI5 and ELIHS (Explain Like I'm a High Schooler) with its own respective story for each component. This will omit quite a few details, but hopefully will help connect ideas to real world concepts so that the broader picture becomes clearer.

What is Quilibrium?

Quilibrium is a protocol under active development with a core mission to secure every bit of traffic on the web. We believe that previous attempts at doing this through trusted institutions have failed, evinced by revelations by Snowden and others, as well as through their own actions – one only need to look briefly at Cloudflare's and others' deplatforming before it starts to get a little uncomfortable about their behaviors in playing internet cop. To answer this, you need to solve for securely decentralizing the web – servers, storage, traffic. This is not a challenge I take lightly, and hard tech problems require hard tech answers.

If you've been deep in the cryptography research space, very little of Q's whitepaper will feel novel, because it isn't – every idea we have utilized is based on existing, battle tested cryptography.

Quilibrium's technologies are not unique – many of these things are inventions that existed in some way in other projects or papers, much like how Bitcoin did not contribute anything new in terms of cryptography or data structures – the novelty was the right combination of technologies which unlocked the entire field of decentralized finance. With Quilibrium's combination of technologies, the scale and speed of applications in a decentralized context becomes so much broader than simply finance alone, while still enabling decentralized finance to flourish.

Quilibrium is:

  • A censorship-resistant peer-to-peer network for application infrastructure.
  • A multi-party computation framework.
  • A privacy-preserving E2EE framework.
  • Incentivized, through the use of a fair-launch based, tokenized consensus model.

Quilibrium is not:

  • A blockchain – strictly, not a distributed ledger produced by linear sequences of blocks of transactions.
  • A design by committee project – like more traditional OSS projects, Quilibrium is BDFL-driven.
  • Flexible on its mission – we will not support censorship, we will not compromise on privacy or secrecy, and we will not compromise on users' fundamental human rights.
  • An unethical launch – we will not engage in token warrants/token sales with investors, not only because a fair launch cannot enable such a thing to happen, but also because an alignment of investors in a business directly to a protocol's token is intrinsically broken (and morally questionable, but this is best reserved for a separate post).

References