NKN integrates Taxa for high-performance, private blockchain

NKN, a blockchain-powered P2P connectivity protocol and Taxa Network, a privacy-preserving, blockchain agnostic layer-2 infrastructure, today announced a collaboration to bring together a decentralized network with TEE-enabled confidential compute to enable a new breed of high-performance, trustless apps.

This strategic partnership will allow NKN to integrate Taxa’s compute environment and smart contract platform on NKN’s global P2P network. The result will provide developers a truly secure and decentralized platform for building the next generation of web 3.0 applications.

Joining Forces

New ultra high definition streaming game services, like Google Stadia, have begun to show the capabilities of running complex computing functions such as gaming in the cloud. However, these solutions still use more centralized data centers with the risk of a single point of failure as seen by recent service outages by Cloudflare and others.

Using NKN’s decentralized network, single points of failure are greatly reduced and with Taxa compute capabilities that leverage the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) you can be assured your application’s availability, integrity, and confidentiality.

TEE is an important element in the future of decentralized but trusted computing as it offers a secure area within the processor to protect both the confidentiality and integrity of the software and data inside. This is especially important in crowdsourced networks like NKN and Taxa where resources can be controlled by 3rd parties. Today, TEE is supported by leading silicon manufacturers like Intel, ARM, AMD and their alliance partners offering many options to run confidential compute within the Internet infrastructure.

The ability to run applications at the edge is critical in meeting the stringent performance requirements needed in-game streaming and autonomous driving applications. By offering integrated network and compute resources across NKN’s more than 20,000 edge nodes, NKN can deploy these high bandwidths, low latency applications with many more presence points than traditional cloud platforms.

This means that applications can run much closer to user locations which results in lower round trip delays, higher bandwidth with less opportunity for backhaul congestion and limits, and overall better customer experience.

NKN and Taxa will also be collaborating to attract developers to build new innovative web 3.0 applications. The initial focus will be on gaming and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications that can take advantage of the partnership’s combined hosting resources and scale.