Autonomi is the culmination of an 18-year quest to deliver an Internet that’s not only democratised, secure, and permanently accessible; but challenges the very surveillance-driven business models that the current web finds itself upon.
A challenge adopted by founder and Scottish engineer David Irvine: to roll back the story of the web to its roots, and rebuild and reconfigure it from the ground up. A vision to combine the dormant space of all connected devices to form a globe-spanning encrypted data layer—a massive array of Internet disks—and stitch it into the fabric of the web as a common and permanently accessible tool we all have a slice of.
Irvine gradually assembled a team—and a company, MaidSafe—to doggedly pursue this vision. First in an ocean-going boat; then a dusty office above a bridal shop; a cold boatshed, and now a globally distributed squad of developers, thinkers, scientists, and PhDs.
He saw the potential to use this network to protect individual privacy and data security, first by eliminating central servers, and then by distributing data as encrypted chunks across this colossal network of commodity devices: turning the Internet itself into the common storage brain for all data—with computers and applications simply being the agnostic tools through which we reassemble our encrypted lives from anywhere. No middlemen nor gatekeepers required.
Autonomi — the autonomous data layer formerly known as the SAFE Network — is now alive and kicking.
Autonomi is a set of protocols built by a dedicated team of engineers, scientists, thinkers, and PhDs, but it's a network diligently designed to be controlled by no one, so it's owned by us all. We, are the future of the Internet
