Blockchains are held as disruptive new technology in 2020. As regulators prepare for legal frameworks, blockchain projects are taking over the world. Industries and companies are seeing the value of blockchains and the trustless environment they provide, and developers are building DApps on different blockchains. These DApps integrate a decentralized cloud infrastructure that is held as the greatest innovation since the internet.
However, the ecosystem is divided among different blockchains. Apps on Ethereum do not talk to Apps on the Tron network. Bitcoin’s liquid network is now ready for DApps to be developed. But this fragmentation costs the users and developers dearly. Without a way for these networks to communicate, trade and exist together, it will be difficult for the industry to build standardized universal applications that the common man can use.
ICTE is a unique platform that solves this problem by creating a decentralized cross-blockchain exchange federation. This solves the major problem of liquid tokens in exchanges. ICTE’s architecture allows members to run an exchange on the ICTE network, and these independent exchanges are connected to the federation to share liquidity across the globe.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is one of the largest global players that provides security solutions for Web 3.0 applications. It is used by over 20 million internet applications and websites. Cloudflare is the standard in security, scalability, and reliability.
Cloudflare has a firewall that protects against DDoS attacks. These attacks are common for cryptocurrency exchanges and can result in hacks that lose crypto tokens from their hot wallet. Cloudflare also features rate-limiting, management of bots, and a VPN. Bot management is important in the crypto sector because there are programmers and hackers looking for an easy way to steal data from an exchange.
Apart from security, Cloudflare helps increase the performance by enabling intelligent routing of web packets, image optimization on desktop and mobile, and building of a cache of the application that serves as the first line of service. This makes the application fast and scalable without having to invest in further hardware.
High performance is nothing with high reliability. An application like ICTE has to be available at every moment or else users and traders risk losing their funds. Hence it is important that Cloudflare provides load balancing, DNS management, and a virtual backbone that helps manage all this from one screen. Cloudflare itself is highly reliable, supporting over 12 million websites globally, and able to reroute across regions in case of minor outages.
Since the entire ICTE network operates in the cloud, it is imperative that they use network services that have the ability to scale on demand. This scalability cannot be achieved by scaling the hardware but has to be done in milliseconds when the users are spread worldwide and demand a critical application like ICTE to support their business and trade. Cloudflare enables this scalability and accessibility by default and allows ICTE exchange-operators to have ease of mind.
InterPlanetary File System
Today, the internet is very important. But the information is stored, owned and controlled by large corporations. Your data is stored by these centralized entities that can go offline any day. All the files and personal information that we upload onto these servers can be lost, all outside of your control. Centralization also brings censorship. Governments and corporations can watch this data and snoop-in on messages. The entire web is centralized because although corporations might be different, their file storage systems and the physical servers are concentrated in the hands of the few.
IPFS relies on a peer-to-peer mechanism to store and serve files when demanded. This means that when any file is uploaded to the IPFS network, it takes all the contents, hashes them into an alphanumeric key, and distributes that key different nodes, copying the content across the network. However, the file is only accessible by those that have the exact hash, which can then be fetched and unhashed on demand.
ICTE uses IPFS to encrypt the necessary files and licenses that their instances use to make them easily accessible by the clients and have them decryptable by their software. The one major issue that IPFS has is that it does not assure that its clients are anonymous and allows clients to locate each other.
Putting Them Together
Combining IPFS and Cloudflare together creates a finely tuned system for ICTE, and solves the risks that happen inside. IPFS is able to handle very large files and distribute them globally through Cloudflare. Further, Cloudflare and IPFS work together to cache the static data that ICTE has on the CDN.
The Cloudflare network supports reverse-proxying, masking the location of ICTE users and but still allowing them to discover and communicate with each other within the network. ICTE’s anonymous communication allows all its clients to have equal opportunity in the global market.
ICTE has made further enhancements inside its own instances allow security improvements such as domain-based licensing and delivery, encryption, and restricting direct server access so that externally, only Cloudflare is able to communicate with it. This shows that ICTE is dedicated to security, anonymity, and accessibility, without compromising any of the values of decentralization.
