Classic Doom Running on Decentralized Skynet

A team of technicians at Nebulous are now running a version of Doom on their decentralized distribution and storage network Skynet. Over the years history has shown us that an operating system is not a proper operating system if we aren't capable of running a version of Doom on it. With that and the COVID-19 quarantine in mind, Nebulous launched a series of games running on Skynet.

We've seen the classic first person shooter on Raspberry Pi's, fridges, printers and in a Tesla. This time around the classic version of Doom is running completely on the decentralized distribution network Skynet. Check it out.

Nebulous launched Skynet on February 19th. It’s a blockchain-based peer-to-peer file storage system powered by Sia. Skynet is direct competition for Tron’s BTFS and Filecoin’s IPFS. Sia already offers a file storage service, which is basically a private cloud storage on the blockchain. They’ve build Skynet for more public activities, like web hosting.

Uploading and interacting with Skynet isn’t the easiest yet. But anybody is allowed to use web portals and Sia’s command-line client to uploads files onto Skynet. For example https://siasky.net is operated by Nebulous, while https://vault.lightspeedhosting.com is under control of Lightspeed Hosting.

Decentralized storage solution not unified

Skynet isn’t the only system that allows for decentralized storage of data. Five years ago Filecoin started with the development of IPFS, which serves a similar purpose to Skynet and is gaining popularity. For example we host our gaming website Play to Earn on IPFS. In addition there’s also Justin Sun’s BitTorrent File System (BTFS) and the lesser known New Kind of Network (NKN).

With IPFS, BTFS, NKN and Skynet there are already four players working on decentralized web storage. However, regular consumers can’t reach websites and content stored on these decentralized platforms easily. Because regular browsers only allow standard DNS web addresses.

However, browsers like Brave, Opera and Unstoppable Browser are ushering a new era. They are introducing support for decentralized protocols. In addition Unstoppable Domains and Ethereum Name Service allow for easier web addresses, which is also a cryptocurrency wallet name. These efforts could lead to wider mainstream support in the years to come.