Diode℠ - Reclaim Your Digital Sovereignty

Reclaim Your Digital Sovereignty

Our mission is to enable digital sovereignty in everyday interactions.

Everything we do at Diode is to enable individuals and organizations with the means of private and secure connectivity. Diode applications, such as dDrive and the Diode CLI, enable secure remote access to assets, files, and software with minimal setup and maintenance effort. The Diode Network makes all this possible by enabling a world where it is sustainable to provide category leading software without exploiting user data.

Today, the team at Diode is busy developing next generation Diode applications, expanding the capabilities of the Diode Network, and growing our base of customers, partners, and developers.

Please get in touch if you’d like to explore a collaboration with Diode!

Team

Our team consists of experts from connected business, decentralized communications, and Internet of Things technologies. We're dedicated to a secure and sustainable Internet future - join us as we upgrade the Internet!

DOMINIC LETZ

Chief Technology Officer

GREG BELCHER

VP Business Development

HANS REMPEL

CEO

PETER LAI

Blockchain Software Engineer

YAHSIN HUANG

Social Media Manager

Our Story

PKI IS BROKEN

While working at one of the world’s largest IoT organizations, one of our biggest customers’ devices all went offline around the world. The IoT servers were functioning, the devices themselves were fine, but we found that a certificate stored on the devices had expired, leading the devices to believe that they could not trust the servers, and so they stopped communicating. The solution? Trick the devices into believing the time was in the past, allowing a patch to be supplied OTA to update the certificates. From this, we realized that most of the world’s IoT devices had a vulnerability related to their inability to securely acquire time - if we could trick the devices for good purposes, how many more devices could be tricked for bad ones?

The Problem of Time

The “Problem of Time” was a difficult one to solve - a valid knowledge of time is assumed in the system of Public Key Infrastructure that secures today’s Internet. It was a chicken-and-egg - if you don’t know the time, you can’t securely communicate. But, if you can’t securely communicate, you can’t trust the time you’re given. We solved the Problem of Time - we developed a way to leverage the Nakamoto Consensus, famously implemented by Bitcoin, to securely bootstrap time. This was a fundamental and exciting discovery! We named the algorithm that implemented the technology “BlockQuick.”

Decentralizing the Blockchain

However, in the process of proving out the concept with available systems, we realized that the method wasn’t realistic in practice due to the state of blockchain technology. Direct communication with nodes was a prerequisite for BlockQuick to function - in practice, IoT devices, and other software applications, could not communicate directly with any existing blockchains. All blockchains required communications with the real world go through a “proxy node” - a full blockchain node that used traditional centralized concepts of trust to proxy communications on behalf of the non-blockchain system. The decentralized trustless world of blockchains required centralization and hierarchical trust for on-ramp/off-ramp interactions! This “Problem of Edge Centralization” was not only a problem for BlockQuick, it severely limited the scope of blockchain technology.

The Birth of the Diode Network

We knew that by solving the “Problem of Edge Centralization,” we would enable a whole new class of Web3 applications that would be sustainable without exploiting user information - we went to work. By leveraging BlockQuick, Ethereum (selected after much consideration), and our deep experience in delivering web services that were scalable both in the technical and business sense, we launched the Diode Network in 2019. The Diode Network is the world’s first and only public blockchain that can communicate directly with every type of system on the planet.

Commercial Validation

As the Diode Network grew, we began to foster a set of applications that took advantage of the network’s bomb-proof security, ease of maintenance, and lower cost-of-operation. Virtual Private Network (VPN), distributed file sharing, and other remote productivity tools uniquely benefit from the Diode Networks’ serverless and trustless environment, particularly in on-premise applications that need remote accessibility. We launched an initial set of capabilities in 2020, and also began developing partnerships with organizations who want out of the business of hosting edge-to-user communication servers.

The Future of the Internet

Today, the Diode Network is more secure than today’s Internet, and completely removes core problems/abuses caused by services centralization and social engineering exploits. It is a leading candidate to underpin the future of Web3 communications, and provides a practical path out of the increasingly snarled mess that is today’s Web2 Internet infrastructure.

The ramifications of these innovations are exciting and will change the face of the Internet! Join us to Upgrade the Internet!

Our Story

One day in 2018, while working at one of the world’s largest IoT organizations, one of our biggest customers’ devices all went offline around the world. The IoT servers were functioning, the devices themselves were fine, but we found that a certificate stored on the devices had expired, leading the devices to believe that they could not trust the servers, and so they stopped communicating. The solution? Trick the devices into believing the time was in the past, allowing a patch to be supplied OTA to update the certificates. From this, we realized that most of the world’s IoT devices had a vulnerability related to their inability to securely acquire time - if we could trick the devices for good purposes, how many more devices could be tricked for bad ones?

The “Problem of Time” was a difficult one to solve - a valid knowledge of time is assumed in the system of Public Key Infrastructure that secures today’s Internet. It was a chicken-and-egg - if you don’t know the time, you can’t securely communicate. But, if you can’t securely communicate, you can’t trust the time you’re given. We solved the Problem of Time - we developed a way to leverage the Nakamoto consensus, famous implemented by Bitcoin, to securely bootstrap time. This was a fundamental and exciting discovery! We named the algorithm that implemented the technology: “BlockQuick.”

As the use of the Diode Network grew, we began to foster a set of applications that took advantage of the network’s lower cost-of-operation and ease of maintenance. Virtual Private Network (VPN), distributed file sharing, and other remote productivity tools uniquely benefit from the Diode Networks’ serverless and trustless environment, particularly in on-premise applications that need remote accessibility. We launched an initial set of capabilities in the “Diode NoCloud Productivity Platform” in 2020, and also began developing partnerships with organizations who want out of the business of hosting edge-to-user communication servers.

The ramifications of these innovations are exciting! First and foremost, every type of web application business model can now be sustainable without the sale or exploitation of user data. An even more far reaching economic implication is that the role of centralized data centers and IT administrators is either commoditized or relegated to niche specializations - the Diode Network enables the crowd sourcing of data center capabilities. Another fundamental implication of the Diode Network is the practical decentralization of trust for Internet actors: it operates with a Distributed Public Key Infrastructure (dPKI) and Decentralized Domain Name System (dDNS). It is more secure than today’s Internet, and completely removes many of the problems/abuses caused by core services centralization. Because of these innovations enabled by BlockQuick, the Diode Network is a leading candidate to underpin Web3 communications. It provides a practical path out of the increasingly snarled mess that is today’s Web2 Internet infrastructure. Upgrade the Internet!