Marlin POND / Marlin

What Is Marlin (POND)?

Marlin is an open protocol that provides a high-performance programmable network infrastructure for DeFi and Web 3.0. The nodes in the Marlin network, called Metanodes, operate the MarlinVM which provides a virtual router interface for developers to deploy customized overlays and perform edge computations.

Notable overlays that can be built using MarlinVM include: * Low-latency block multicast to scale blockchains * Low-latency mempool sync for arbitrageurs * Mesh networks * Anonymity networks like mixnets * Device optimization and caching responses of API to Infura, Alchemy etc

Its native utility token POND is used for: * Running validator nodes on the network via staking * Making and voting on governance proposals to determine how network resources are allocated * Determining a set of network performance auditors and compensating users from an insurance fund in case of a SLA breach

Marlin aims to deliver on the promise of a decentralized web where applications secured via the blockchain are indistinguishable in terms of performance to users accustomed to Web 2.0.

Who Are the Founders of Marlin?

Marlin is the brainchild of developers Siddhartha, Prateesh and Roshan, all of whom have extensive experience in peer-to-peer networking.

Responsible for the development of Zilliqa, the first high-throughput blockchain to employ sharding in production, Siddhartha has had expexrience working at Microsoft and Adobe and is the author of the 2 US patents. Prateesh is a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a focus on Computer Networks and Roshan, an avid open-source enthusiast, was a contributor to the Boost C++ libraries.

The project employs former researchers at Ethereum Foundation, International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) world medallists and developers with experience at Facebook, Cisco and Bosch. It counts the former CEO of Bittorrent and professors at MIT and Princeton amongst its advisors including authors of seminal P2P papers such as Chord DHT. Marlin is backed by the likes of Binance Labs, Electric Capital and Michael Arrington.

What Makes Marlin Unique?

Marlin is one of the few layer-0 projects focussed on network layer optimizations. Similar to Filecoin which is incentivized IPFS, Marlin claims to be the equivalent of an incentived libp2p. This makes Marlin ubiquitous in the decentralized web as any peer-to-peer application relies on networking between distributed nodes to function.