GRIDNET OS

GRIDNET OS tries to move an operating system onto a peer-to-peer network. A user opens a terminal or a graphical shell and sees windows, a file system and a command line, but the interface assets, computation and storage all come from nodes on the network with no central server. Development has run since 2017, the shell follows parts of Unix and DOS convention, and the interface hosts applications for anonymous browsing, file sharing, multi-party meetings and on-chain transfers.

Three designs stand out. A bootloader discovers peers through a distributed hash table, pulls interface assets from several at once and verifies their integrity. On the compute side, decentralised processing threads let an interface application dispatch a thread to other nodes to run bytecode, settling through millisecond-scale micropayments. On storage, a readable and writable distributed file system supports setting access control lists from the command line, with permission changes recorded in the state machine. All traffic is encrypted and layered over onion routing, and identity is confirmed by scanning a code with a mobile app. Several peer-reviewed papers back these mechanisms, placing the project where decentralised computing meets operating systems.