This Nerd’s App Might Just Make Your Phone Pay for Itself

25-year-old Mayank Bhola claimed to have figured out a way to create a network that make large-scale computing way more efficient using personal smartphones. It sounded eerily like the “The New Internet” plot line from HBO’s Silicon Valley, but who was I to judge?

Bhola's app Nanostack, which he created with Gaurav Dubey, will install on your phone or laptop, scan it to determine if it’s in use or not, and redistribute computational power accordingly. But to what end? To find out, I met Bhola for coffee in Delhi’s Khan Market when he could spare a little time away from his day job as Chief Technology Officer of Juggernaut Books, one of India’s largest book publishers.

He explained, “If you upload a picture. Facebook stores 20 different versions of your picture in 20 resolutions, for various screens and apps, like for when viewing on a desktop vs mobile, seeing it in timeline or as a dp, etc. This kind of computation can be easily done using your phone.”

The idea isn’t new. SETI’s volunteer computing project was all the dormroom rage in the 2000s. But instead of searching for aliens, you now accumulate points for tasks completed which can be exchanged for money.

“What if I told you that you can rent out the computing power of your phone to a company like The Viral Fever, who will use your idle phone to crunch large files on their servers to save money, while you get paid for providing your phone?” Bhola said.

The amount depends on the number of tasks completed Bhola explained. “And no one can screw with you because all transactions will be on a blockchain.”

Now he had my attention. Like most people with access to the internet, I’d heard of blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Blockchain offers a transparent way to prove a transaction (or interaction) happened, which means it theoretically could range beyond money.

“Imagine buying a smartphone for 70k and making that up in just two years using Nanostack,” Bhola said.

“Think of Netflix’s Stranger Things. The show was shot in 9K making one episode four terabytes in size. That has to be converted into smaller chunks. Now this task usually takes a week for one episode, but Nanostack can take this file, and give 10 mb for each device on its network to render, which will happen very quickly,” Bhola explained.

But what about privacy concerns? In light of sneaky beacon tracking done by apps like Silverpush, and scares about Facebook using microphones on phones to catch keywords and sell ads, what’s to keep the app from being sketchy?

“Nanostack doesn’t require any permissions, not one,” Bhola clarified, meaning it won’t access a phone’s camera, location, microphone, storage, etc, to function. Nor is the app collecting any data. Over time, it will “profile systems based on computing power and number of tasks completed reliably.” He also mentioned running an anonymization cycle over the data. Users who will provide their phone, can have their trust deficit handled by just looking up the integrated blockchain he stressed.

Nanostack recently started a private Alpha where users can request access to try it out. He estimates that Nanostack will have a Beta running by December 2018, with a single written software in three versions; iOS, Android, web, already furnishing compression of image and video files and under strenuous testing by 100s of users.

All pretty ambitious.

Akshay Aggarwal, founder of the Facebook group Blockchained India, was cautiously excited when we asked him for his opinion on the app, the funding of which he is facilitating. Blockchained India is “a peer-to-peer information exchange”—a network between investors, idea people and engineers.

Of all the ideas he’d encountered and pitched daily, Nanostack seemed the most promising. “When we discussed Nanostack, I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibilities it will have," he told me. "There are almost no players as of now in India. We are at least a year, year half away from any major distributed computing player even entering the market,” Aggarwal said.

Interestingly, rather than raise funding here, Aggarwal is using his contacts to set Bhola up with VC’s from Silicon Valley. “There will be scalability issues with Nanostack, but most of them are inherently a blockchain problem,” he told me. Ethereum currently handles 800K transactions per day, while Bitcoin is nearing 500K vs VISA which recorded 1,667 transactions per second in 2016.

The Indian government’s think tank NITI Aayog, is hoping engineers and tech enthusiasts like Bhola can actually build something tangible. “Blockchain is not disruptive in the way AI is disruptive,” Aalekh Sharan, an officer at Niti Aayog, told me. “Efficient use of AI can reduce manual sources and costs. blockchain doesn’t work like that. The whole point is that multiple people used it, it was adopted as a standard, and now we have applications based on the platform. It’s a process.”

Technology has to navigate the precious life cycle of hype, as much as public imagination.

“The end of any blockchain-based process should be to make a service, or accountability better, to stop leakages. If it’s not helping in that way, then apart from generating hype, it’s not doing anything,” Sharan said.

Only time will tell if Nanostack will go beyond hype to generating earnings for its users.

Follow Parthshri Arora on Twitter.