Welcome to Kadena Eco’s Project Spotlight Series, where we highlight the groundbreaking work of organizations currently innovating and building on Kadena!

Today, we are shining the spotlight on Massive, a company that’s bootstrapping a monetization alternative to online advertising. Massive’s SDK offers developers and their users the option of making money and paying with idle processing power, storage, and bandwidth rather than personal attention and data. 500,000-plus monthly active users have opted in with Massive and, together, form a supercomputer that compensates developers by hosting “massively” distributed projects. The company is funded by Point72 Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Kraken Ventures, and other blockchain leaders.

Massive is currently developing **NoPool**, a cryptocurrency mining pool with built-in Kadena support. NoPool is revolutionizing mining by embracing progressive decentralization and by incentivizing miners to use clean energy. The pool reduces fees for “green miners” while being as performant as existing pools.

The Head of NoPool, **Mark Cavallo**, will be answering some pertinent and interesting questions about NoPool as well as why Massive is choosing to build on the Kadena blockchain!

Proof of Work remains the only method that’s made 51% attacks and other related threats sufficiently expensive to secure transactions at scale without relying on central authorities (a 51% attack can occur when a group of miners aggregates enough hashrate, stake weight, or equivalent voting power to rewrite a blockchain’s transaction history).

However, with PoW’s mass adoption and heightened competition for mining rewards, two new issues have emerged:

NoPool is a Kadena-first, Stratum mining pool that was created to resolve these issues while maintaining performance at competitive parity. The goals for the pool are to have no centralization, no emission footprint or conventional fees for low-emission miners, and no performance compromise.

NoPool’s current implementation does so by running on parts of Massive’s carbon-neutral distributed network and by extending emission reduction beyond the network with first-of-a-kind incentives for mining operations that are powered by clean energy. Over time, the pool is set to increase distribution across the network and undergo progressive decentralization.

NoPool is designed to be both highly distributed and fully decentralized. The pool is already more distributed than any Stratum pool has been before, by being deployed to the Massive network’s most powerful computers, and every computer on the network should be able to contribute in later project phases by becoming Massive’s version of a generic blockchain light node.

NoPool’s governance is to likewise transition to “delegated decentralization”, where decision-making power flows to miners based on their share of the pool’s hashrate. NoPool is initially operated by a compliant US organization, which is itself almost unique among pools.

The Massive network and, in turn, NoPool are also carbon neutral. NoPool attempts to push sustainability practices further, to the extended network of miners, by providing novel certifications and incentives. Mining operations that use at least 80% clean energy are eligible to be certified as low-emission miners and to receive feeless pool service starting with one month per quarter.

Meanwhile, benchmarks so far show that NoPool is as performant as legacy pools.

We’ve begun onboarding miners who want to help us test (in exchange for paying no pool fees) to NoPool’s private beta and we’ll publicly release the pool toward the end of this quarter.

Everyone can sign up for beta access or more info about the public pool at nopool.com.

We believe in the decentralized properties and time-tested security of Proof of Work. Kadena is the natural partner to build our sustainable PoW pool with because the Kadena blockchain adds an elegant improvement to the consensus mechanism that increases transactions per second and decreases energy consumption per transaction.

Massive’s mission is to assemble a distributed computer that helps offer a more user-friendly business model for and re-decentralize the infrastructure of the internet, so we’re excited about all the developers who are either integrating our SDK into their native and web apps or rolling their decentralized projects out to our network. Under the latter category, we’ve been adding support for promising blockchain projects to the Massive network. These projects include Arweave, Akash, and, of course, Kadena.

As the network scales, we’re starting to support non-blockchain processing, storage, and bandwidth tasks too. Developers of general-purpose projects can now push to hundreds of thousands of computers around the world by submitting a request to access the Massive network.

Lots of app developers have been building with the Massive SDK, which should lead in the short term to more in-app offers to pay for premium features, content, and services with Massive. Longer term, we hope to have assembled the world’s most powerful supercomputer so infrastructure developers can distribute and decentralize arbitrary workloads instantly.

Although filling governments’ regulatory vacuum with get-rich-quick schemes seems to mostly (and happily) be a thing of the past, the opportunity to wrest the future of computing from mega corporations by delivering real utility to people in a decentralized way continues to be (one might say) massive (especially because the layer-1 rails like Kadena have already been laid). We’re eager to see the emergence of such projects, executed with long-term thinking and responsible stewardship, and to back them with distributed resources.

Many thanks to Mark for sharing what his vision of a sustainable crypto mining future will look like. We’ll be featuring more project spotlights in the coming weeks for Project Spotlights, so stay tuned as we’ll continue to profile innovative organizations that are currently building on Kadena with support from Kadena Eco, our innovation network that supports startups at every phase of their development journey.

To keep updated on NoPool and Massive’s progress, make sure to follow them on their socials:

Kadena Eco is an innovation network fuelling mainstream adoption of Web3, DeFi and NFTs. We unite technical founders and entrepreneurs with the world’s top blockchain leaders, venture capitalists and acceleration partners to support startups at every phase of their development journey. By leveraging Kadena’s builder-centric blockchain that delivers Web3 innovation with Web2 usability, Kadena Eco aims to speed the development and adoption of meaningful applications that benefit everyday people, worldwide.