Amidst the raging crypto bull market, the world’s first shared computer, Bless, is now offering users the ability to participate in its testnet through a Chrome extension. The testnet will be launching on Solana.
This innovative DePIN project is building a global network powered by everyday devices. By participating in its testnet through the new Chrome extension, you can automatically direct compute resources from your CPU and GPU to the websites, applications, and services that you are using.
But worry not, it won’t overburden your laptop or phone. The Bless network employs various models and algorithms to ensure that every user device can actually handle the computation demand in order to improve efficiency, reliability, and security.
To make unused computer resource sharing possible, the network analyzes each user’s hardware specification, geolocation, existing workloads, computation type, and device performance history, which ensures optimal task allocation, efficient resource utilization, and seamless performance.
Bless started as an open-source project within the offchain community, created by Michael and Derek—Michael from Binance Research and Derek from Akash. Both encountered challenges in distributed compute and came together to design a solution that transforms fragmented computing resources into a cohesive, accessible network.
During this period, Bless raised a total of $8 million in a pre-seed round led by NGC Ventures and a seed funding round led by M31 Capital and co-led by Frachtis to make its shared computer a reality. Other investors in the two rounds included Plassa Capital, Interop Ventures, MH Ventures, and No Limit Holdings.
Besides growing its engineering team and ecosystem functions, this year, the focus at Bless has been on testing the project capabilities through incentivized testnets, with yet another capability released to expand its accessibility. Its native token (BLESS) is also planned to be released soon, which will power the Bless ecosystem and reward participants.
Empowering Users, Disrupting the Status Quo
Until now, the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have powered the Internet and captured all the revenue while everyday users create the content that makes it valuable.
Not only do users lack say or control over how the services they use are run, but they also receive no share in the revenue they help businesses generate by using these applications and services.
Bless aims to change this by enabling users to participate in edge computing, where data analysis and processing happen on the very device where the data generation and collection is happening, such as mobile phones, self-driving cars, computers, and IoT devices.
By making edge computing decentralized and more inclusive, Bless is replacing huge data centers run by a few individuals with the world’s first shared computer.
The way this works is that tasks are matched to the most suitable devices using the orchestration model. The model ensures that demanding tasks are handled by high-power nodes while everyday devices like phones and laptops manage lighter tasks. This maximizes computational efficiency and reduces latency and energy consumption while maintaining system reliability and security.
As co-founder Li explained in an interview, much like Uber connects drivers to users, Bless connects applications with users. And in exchange for offering their computational power to apps via Bless, users get rewarded by both applications and Bless.
For this, Bless has created a WebAssembly (WASM) application framework featuring a ‘nestled node’ embedded in the application. So, instead of requiring the user to run a special node or download software, Bless allows the user to provide compute resources automatically to the application that they are using through its network.
While WASM enables efficient execution of varied and complex applications in a decentralized and trustless manner, Bless’ network-neutral application (nnApp) framework ensures that dApps are compatible with all blockchain networks (both L1 and L2) while remaining free from their limitations.
As Bless paves the way for decentralized computing with next-generation dApps, it stands poised to reshape how users engage with the internet and drive the real-world adoption of crypto.
