Cryptocurrency and blockchain products can solve a lot of pressing issues plaguing the world today. With internet censorship being a very big trend as of right now, it is evident people will need to find a new solution in order to access the information they desire. Substratum aims to provide that solution, and the project unveiled its early open beta earlier this week.

The Substratum Open Early Beta

To put this into perspective, Substratum has been around for quite some time now. It is a project a lot of people have high expectations of, mainly because the team aims to provide an alternative way of accessing the internet and bypassing censorship. Whether or not they will be successful in this regard remains to be determined.

Interested users are now able to access this project through its early open beta release. As is always the case when an early test version is released, one has to keep in mind that issues may arise when testing this technology. Moreover, it does not include all of the functionality one would expect, but that is only normal at this stage of development.

One has to commend the Substratum team for making this beta accessible to everyone, rather than just focusing on developers and coders. This means the Substratum team had to integrate a very basic UI instead of relying on a command line interface. It will not be the final version of the Substratum UI, but it is evident this interface will give most people a basic idea of what they can expect from future versions of the project.

With this open early beta, users will be able to access most of the worldwide web without any problems. This will be done through the Substratum network itself, but there are some caveats to be aware of. Not all internet content will be accessible at this stage, as video playback is currently not supported. It is not a big deal, though, given the project’s early stage of development. Providing a viable alternative to Tor and VPN servers will not be easy by any means.

Additionally, this open early beta does not include the Neighborhoods functionality or the earning mechanism. The latter feature, which will be introduced in a future version, should let enthusiasts run their own Substratum node and get paid for it. Such nodes will also allow users to access all the worldwide web content they wish to see. 

Substratum enthusiasts are advised to provide as much feedback as possible to the developers. This is still an early beta version of the final platform, and there may be some issues users will need to contend with. Installing the beta client is not difficult, as instructions are provided on the Substratum web page. It is a big milestone for the project, although it remains to be seen how users will respond to this client.