Context

Online, the vast majority of communication is between users on mobile devices. Mobile devices are designed in ways that benefit their mobile nature, but these differences present unique challenges for decentralisation.

Mobile devices and the operating systems they run, were initially designed with centralisation in mind. As such, it is assumed that most apps will be accessing data from a centralised server while they are being used. This server is always on and maintains the state of all users of the application.

This pro-centralisation design default means that users (and the mobile OS) can kill applications and network connections whenever necessary to save resources like battery power. Any data missing in the app can be retrieved from the server, should it ever be needed.

Many decentralised technologies take a victory lap after developing a solution that works only on always connected, always on computers. While these discoveries are fantastic in their own right, they have ignored the vast majority of users on mobile devices who cannot access services in this way. Sylo builds decentralised technology for everyone, which means understanding the way our users want to communicate.

A perfect solution would provide a direct peer-to-peer (P2P) connection between any two devices on the globe. However, due to current technological limitations, most of our devices cannot receive connections from others - they are bound to the centralised client/server paradigm.

Because of this, P2P protocols that work well for “always available” users do not work well enough between mobile devices to compete with centralised alternatives. Messages often don’t arrive in a timely manner and direct connections (like synchronisation events or voice calls) fail to be established often enough to be relied upon.

We launched the Sylo Network to solve these problems and bring private, decentralised communication to mobile devices. To do this, we decentralise the data, opting to let our users own their own data, without the need to create permanent storage off-device. Instead of holding group data on a server, Sylo replicates group data across the devices that are part of that group. All communication is performed as P2P communication, with Sylo Nodes acting as routers on the network and delivering packets asynchronously.

In this setting, Seeker Nodes bridge the performance gap inherent in pure P2P systems, leveraging their position on the network to link peers who would otherwise be unable to reach one another. Specifically, Seeker Nodes obtain a publicly dialable address and commit to providing services on this address with high reliability.

This capability means that Seeker Nodes are perfectly positioned to provide decentralised communications services to the Metaverse. Through the use of the Sylo Wallet SDK, any distributed application can unlock high-performance decentralised communication for its users - by using the user's wallet, or items held in their wallet, as the basis of their online identity.

The Sylo Network will enable open access to a common communications layer for all metaverse projects, safeguarding the metaverse against becoming a walled garden.