The world of blockchain has exploded over the past 10 years, with widespread development, technological advances, and public support streamlining the evolution of this field. Over recent years, blockchain has become a global player, with decentralized applications built on Web3 growing in locked-in value, transaction count, and activity.
However, despite the huge leaps that the Web3 industry has made over the past few years, development speeds and ease still pale in comparison to Web2 deployments. While Ethereum’s developer toolboxes help streamline development, they still fail to offer the same infrastructure and architecture that Web2 developers can access.
Fleek aims to change that, providing a comprehensive ecosystem and multi-service decentralized edge protocol upon which developers can create and run cloud-like services. Overcoming previous infrastructural barriers, Fleek offers a nuanced and out-of-the-box solution for developing fully decentralized cloud-like web services and dApps.
In this article, we’ll explore Fleek, its history, its main features, and how it’s rapidly becoming the go-to ecosystem for Web3 infrastructural development.
Introduction to Fleek
Fleek is a Web3 hosting and storage development company, offering a simple, modular, and multi-service decentralized edge protocol. With Fleek, developers can create and run cloud-like web services and build Web3 apps with ease. Developers can build any web service on Fleek, including serverless functions, compute, CND, bandwidth, and more.
Fleek provides the Web3 infrastructure that overcomes the complexities of current Web3 technology. By creating a better environment where developers can create and deploy their applications. Fleek aims to create a Web3 development system that mirrors what’s currently available in Web2. It facilitates the rapid creation of applications.
Solving the lack of cohesiveness across distinct Web3 infrastructure, Fleek provides a connective experience that makes it as easy as possible for developers to create in this new iteration of the internet. What’s more, Fleek is currently putting applications on chain, allowing for a more decentralized and accessible system for users. This concept is called NFAs (Non-Fungible Applications), allowing users to mint a copy of an application and load its code from the NFT itself.
As an advanced infrastructural system, Fleek overcomes the central problems that face the world of blockchain construction. Decentralized, effective, and scalable, Fleek is a powerful solution for builders.
How Did Fleek Come to Be?
Fleek was founded in 2019 and was originally called Terminal. Terminal was an effective development platform for Ethereum. Wanting to push beyond this singular function after recognizing the current limitations within Web3 infrastructure, Fleek then rebranded to a Web3 hosting and storage business.
Fleek had the aim to make building the web services of Web3 as easy as possible. They obtained around $25m in series A funding from Polychain and other infrastructure protocols to create an ecosystem around the Fleek Network. Since then, Fleek has continued to scale, advancing its offering and increasing the number of services it supports.
In 2023, Fleek is a fully-fledged Web3 infrastructural ecosystem, providing developers with everything they need to build reliable applications on Web3.
What Problem Does Fleek Solve?
Although the world of blockchain has made impressive progress over the past decade, it still doesn’t come close to the ease of developing within Web2 environments. Web3 lacks infrastructural flexibility, is deeply disconnected, and is currently untamed. Fleek aims to solve these issues, providing a complete ecosystem of infrastructure and tools that allow builders to create, deploy, host, store, and power entire Web3 applications.
Fleek provides a multi-service blockchain network that takes the best of systems like Ethereum and offers the same seamless and serverless development. Yet, developers can also use Fleek for web services and cloudless activities, scaling the efficiency and capabilities of Web3 development.
Fleek offers a range of services that allow developers to innovate their building strategies. It facilitates development within decentralized architecture, and unlocks a range of efficiency opportunities. Developers have access to a vast selection of Fleek services, helping them to rapidly create impactful Web3 applications. Across cloud-like services like hosting, IPFS, IPNS, storage, and more. Fleek is continually expanding its offering to accommodate more specific developer needs.
Key Features of Fleek
Beyond just addressing and overcoming infrastructural issues that Web3 currently has, Fleek allows developers to push beyond, creating a uniquely user-friendly and effective development space. Within Fleek, users will have access to all of the architecture that they need to create decentralized applications and host them.
There are a few core features of Fleek which make it stand out from the crowd:
- NFAs
- Hosting
- Storage
- ENS Domains
Let’s break these down further.
NFAs
NFAs, also known as non-fungible applications, are a new standard that Fleek brings to Web3. These bring apps onto the chain, storing them on IPFS and allowing builders to create a multi-access point application. With NFAs, users will be able to get personal decentralized access to apps that they collect.
Currently, dApps depend on a main DNS URL, which is completely centralized and hosted on Web 2 infrastructure. The NFA system will create a new way to distribute and access applications. It provides an innovative approach that benefits users, builders, and hosts.
Hosting
Hosting is a powerful feature of the Fleek ecosystem, allowing developers to deploy, and host. And sustain censorship-free sites on the open web. Fleek has made the hosting system as easy as possible, allowing developers to get started and deploy their own site in a matter of seconds.
In three steps, developers can deploy their site to this decentralized space:
- Connect a repository from sites like GitHub
- Add and create build settings
- Deploy a site and watch it go live.
With GIT integration, auto SSL features, and collaborative workspaces, hosting is a core part of the Fleek ecosystem that developers can benefit from. By using the revolutionary edge network, developers are empowered to access distributed p2p tech (IPFS) that provides world-class response times. With over 150 locations globally, a 10x performance boost compared to IPFS directly, and 99.99% uptime, Fleek is a great hosting solution.
Fleek Hosting provides powerful decentralized infrastructure.
Storage
Fleek allows developers to store, upload, pin, and fetch files from IPFS rapidly and easily. Offering CLI, UI, and SDK interfaces, developers can use whichever approach they prefer to easily upload files and interact with them. Fleek uses Fleek Edge, built-in CDN, and Fleek Storage to create a comprehensive storage system for businesses, applications, and customers.
Fleek offers incredibly fast storage, allowing everyone to access the files and resources they need faster than ever before. When compared to direct retrieval from IPFS, Fleek’s system is over 10x faster and offers users a simplified experience.
Fleek’s CLI & SDK are also AWS S3 compatible, allowing for rapid integration and movement between S3 and OPFS. Prioritizing ease of access, Fleek is also developer friendly and compatible with any programming language.
ENS Domains
Fleek allows developers to create and add ENS domains to their sites on IPFS. If you’re looking for a truly decentralized experience, the Ethereum Name Service domain name will allow you to create your site. What’s more, you will never have to worry about updating your IPFS content hash after deploying, as Fleek manages this automatically.
There are only three steps to linking your ENS domain in Fleek, making the process as user-friendly as possible:
- Create and add an ENS domain to a site
- Set up an IPNS record
- Deploy the site and watch as it is automatically updated.
Fleek allows you to create truly decentralized websites that are censorship resistant, distributed, and fully user-owned. Especially considering it only takes around 30 seconds to deploy a site, this is an impressive architectural feat.
Final Thoughts
Despite advances in the field, developing in Web3 is still much more challenging than Web2 counterparts, leading to developer frustration, ineffective build cycles, and overtly complicated efforts to decentralize. Over time, these challenges have started to wain, especially with the introduction of infrastructural tools that specifically aim to help empower Web3 developers.
Fleek is an innovative infrastructural platform that offers a world-class multi-service decentralized edge protocol. By offering developers easy-to-use infrastructure, abstracted experience, and a decentralized network to build and host any number of web services, Fleek gives this industry the flexibility it needs.
With Fleek and other infrastructural tools, simplicity, scalability, and efficiency are finally arriving in the world of Web3 building.
