3.4 KiB
| title | sidebar_position |
|---|---|
| About | 1 |
Nimbus was created to promote client diversity and network decentralization on Ethereum in the belief that blockchain technology's full transformative potential can only be realized if running its infrastructure is widely accessible.
Ethereum's security—its resistance to external threats and censorship—comes from its decentralization. We believe that lowering the barrier to network participation will result in greater decentralization and, consequently, a more resilient network. As such, we are building each of the three Nimbus clients to be as lightweight, secure and easy to use as possible.
The Nimbus' consensus client—along with its still-in-development execution and light clients— are designed to perform well on a range of systems, including Raspberry Pis and mobile devices, lowering the barrier to entry to run Ethereum's infrastructure. Meanwhile, our resource-conserving optimizations benefit those operating more powerful systems by freeing resources for other tasks, without compromising on reward performance.
Those client teams earlier to market than Nimbus have typically developed for higher specification hardware, as one would expect from the first client implementations to serve a new, cutting-edge system like post-Merge Ethereum. While their implementations make for a more diverse client ecosystem and their R&D efforts have pushed the space forward tremendously, there remains a gap for an Ethereum client tailored to lower specification devices, that encourages increased network decentralization. Nimbus fills that gap.
In addition to striving for maximum accessibility via lighter client implementations, Nimbus' design goals are to provide an architecture that makes it simple to embed Nimbus into other software. The Nimbus Light Web Proxy, for example, enables decentralized applications to verify data received from external RPC end-points. Consequently, Nimbus reduces reliance on third-party software and service providers that introduce potential vulnerabilities through single points of failure.
Nimbus history
Status—the creator of the Ethereum-based decentralized messaging application—first announced Nimbus in August 2018 as a client implementation research project focused on sharding, light clients and next-generation Ethereum technologies, with a goal of addressing scalability and accessibility concerns. It was inspired by a vision of the future in which Ethereum "lives" in millions of embedded systems around the world rather than a few thousand powerful computers.
At its creation, Nimbus' goal was to research and build a client light enough to run on such resource-restricted devices and modular enough to allow for rapid iteration and implementation of research. Initially, the team planned to develop an energy- and compute-efficient, mobile-first client for the full web3 tech stack—decentralized logic, decentralized storage and decentralized messaging.
However, as research into the latter two branches slowed, Nimbus narrowed its focus to crafting a high-quality, lightweight Ethereum implementation to promote decentralization and strengthen the network against single-client failures.
Why "Nimbus"?
The name Nimbus was chosen because of its allusions to:
-
A different kind of "dark cloud" computing.
-
The spiritual symbolism of sanctity and holiness.
-
Nim, the language in which it is written.
-
A "bus" in communications systems architecture.