French Startup Offers Idle Servers Part-Time Job to Power Ethereum DApps

At the same time, there are millions of computers and servers throughout the world that waste energy and money, idle and underemployed.

This is the idea of iExec Computing Power Marketplace - a sort of Airbnb for computing power that allows anyone, business or individual, to rent out their unused computing resources like a spare room in their apartment.

Based in Lyon, France, iExec aims to make cheap and abundant computing power available to anyone by releasing a marketplace that enables one to trade cloud computing power as a commodity.

Delivering on its promises, iExec brought its computing power marketplace online on May 29, during the Blockshow conference in Berlin, when Gilles Fedak - iExec's founder and CEO - gave a keynote speech and performed a 3D rendering demo.

This is exactly what iExec does - its marketplace makes computing power a tradeable asset, and offers a way to reward those who pledge their spare resources.

"The computing power to run big data applications is most often provided by cloud and High Performance Computing infrastructures. However, cloud and HPC infrastructures are complex and expensive. That means that innovative small businesses often don't have the means and the expertise to acquire and operate HPC platforms, while traditional cloud infrastructure vendors like Amazon AWS are still very expensive for demanding applications."

To become attractive for current cloud and HPC users, iExec has to actually create a formidable network that can deliver substantial computing power.

"At the moment, the gas mechanism provided by the Ethereum blockchain makes the execution of algorithms with computation and/or memory requirements rapidly costly and performance prohibitive. Thanks to [] iExec, DApps will have a simple, secure, and practical way to reach off-chain computing resources to execute their applications," the company said in its white paper.

One example is the DApp Challenge that iExec has organized, where they financed 15 innovative projects with a grant of $150K. Also, iExec created an app store for DApps - or a DApp Store - that proposes a way for the developers to efficiently monetize their DApps.

"Golem aims at first assembling a network to attract regular 3D rendering users to their platform, SONM is approaching fog and edge computing from the beginning, while iExec first focuses on supporting DApps to build a decentralized cloud that eventually will be competitive enough to attract cloud and HPC users," states the iExec white paper.