Ready to take the internet back from Big Tech? Box by Functionland makes YOU the owner of your space in the cloud!

Cloud computing has given us real-time collaboration, backup and sync, sharing, and access to our data from anywhere. It has become a pillar of our life online. But cloud providers don’t run the cloud for free. They demand something in return. That’s why they track our behavior online, sell our info to third parties, and change terms and conditions when it suits them. . . . Some even claim legal ownership of our data!

Most of us find the advantages of cloud services worth the monthly subscription fees. Some of us are even willing to sacrifice privacy or spend time watching ads.

What if there was a better way?

Box is the plug-and-play cloud storage alternative that frees you from reliance on subscription cloud services. It lets you share and collaborate exactly as you do in the cloud, while providing private cloud storage and free, open-source apps.

No tracking. No subscription fees. No kidding!
Big Tech charges you to use its cloud hardware. You rent cloud services by paying with cash, personal data and privacy. Box is different. With Box, YOU are the owner. You can reclaim your privacy. Box is powered by our open-source, peer-to-peer protocols. These protocols form the Fula network: a secure, encrypted network that replaces big tech hardware with individual Box owners.

You get photo storage, automatic backups, and other free-to-use services. Your data is always available, always secure.

Box puts privacy first.

Box is built from the ground up. It was designed to put the power back into YOUR hands. There is no tracking and no ads. Your data is your property, and yours alone. Your photos, files, and data are fully encrypted. Nobody else has a key. Only you can access your data. Only you can share it.

Box stays home. Your data comes with you.

Box is stationary hardware that sits on your desk, syncs with your devices and provides all the advantages you’ve come to expect from cloud services. Anything you choose to store, from cellphone photos to laptop files, are fully encrypted, synced and kept safe within your Box.

Your data is safely backed up on the Fula Network

Your Box connects with other Boxes to form the secure, people-owned Fula network. Box stores your encrypted data and also maintains backups on other Box devices connected to the Fula network. And it gives you seamless data access from anywhere. No matter what, your data is as safe and recoverable as it is in the cloud, only for free. Available on all your devices, accessible from anywhere.

Box provides as much storage as you need.

Cloud storage services typically offer either too little storage or way, way too much at far too high a cost. Box XL comes with 1 terabyte of storage. If you need more, you can expand your Box by plugging in an existing storage device you already own, purchasing a new storage tower, or adding a framework expansion card.

Box apps and services are free forever. For real.

Box’s photo app, Fotos, will be ready to use at launch. Fotos is a polished, forever-free app that provides swift, seamless, easy access to and sharing of your photos from anywhere, across any device.

Box pays for itself.

With the average American household spending at least $243 per year (2021) on internet subscription services, an investment in Box pays for itself within the first twelve months of ownership. When you start using Box, you start saving as much as $24+ per month, and earning $FULA tokens too. 

You have immediate access to some of Box’s most popular apps, including Fotos, an app that provides fast, easy access to and sharing of your photos from anywhere, across any device; Box Files, which provides file syncing and storage across all your devices; and Box Password Manager (available shortly after release), which leverages hyper-private encryption to guarantee you seamless access to your passwords from anywhere, on any device.

Box rewards open-source developers.

Box creates a sustainable and monetized ecosystem for open-source developers, UX designers, and content creators. They are empowered—and paid—to build apps that are free for end-users and provide valuable and useful services like remote office, gaming, messaging and collaboration tools. The possibilities are endless . . .

$FULA tokens pay creators…and reward you, too!

Box silently mines $FULA tokens and uses them to reward people for providing resources on the Fula network. When you provide Box resources to others, for example sharing extra storage, you’re rewarded in $FULA tokens for your contribution. When you use Box apps and services, Box quietly compensates the open-source developers, UX designers, content creators and contributors who built them for you. This makes it possible for us to ensure that apps on Box are forever-free, while still reimbursing their creators for maintenance and upgrades. Imagine BitTorrent, but legal and free for everyone.

Box is built to be built on.

Our hardware is also an open-source platform. With a modular plug-and-play design and standardized dimensions, Box lets hardware creators build additional plug-in towers to extend its functionality. Thanks to our modular design, upgrading Box – for example when the new Thunderbolt standard is released – can be accomplished for just a few dollars.

Box is built on energy-efficient architecture.

As little as $15 per year. That’s the projected energy bill for a Box Lite running as a normal storage server for 12 months.

Technical Specifications

Box is powered by Raspberry Pi 4, which consists of a high-performance 64-bit quad-core processor. It offers up to 8 GB of RAM, dual-band 2.4/5.0 GHz wireless LAN, Bluetooth 5.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB 3.0. Box has multiple, expandable USB3 ports that serve to extend Box’s functions with more towers, or to enable it to act as a docking station.

Two models are currently available: Box Lite and Box XL, both with silver aluminum casing.

Box Lite

A single tower with a compute module that functions as a hub, allowing users to connect additional devices like an external storage drive. Box Lite also comes with two USBC ports. (Should you need to connect your own storage or purchase additional framework ports.)

Box XL

Box XL comes with a base, grid and two active towers. One tower is the “hub,” which controls connections with the other towers. The second tower, the “left brain,” comes with a processor and 1TB pre-installed. Additional perks of Box XL include:

• Ability to expand your Box with 7 additional towers, letting you add compute towers in the future
• Box XL includes Hub towers that allow users to configure connections between towers through the mobile App
• Hub tower also acts as a docking station to connect different peripherals to a laptop (through the designated USB-C on the tower)
• Box XL’s modular design enables independent hardware creators to build innovative utility towers to expand Box’s functionality
• Our partners are working with Functionland to provide their own mining towers for this form factor, meaning that in the near future Box will be able to mine other tokens in addition to $FULA.

Perks

Design

In propelling our mission forward, we are partnered with multi-hyphenate visionary Yves Béhar to develop an elevated and elegant form factor for our hardware. Béhar is a world-renowned industrial designer, entrepreneur, philanthropist and educator, as well as the Founder and CEO of fuseproject, a multidisciplinary studio in San Francisco. (Read more about Yves here.)

Manufacturing

Box is manufactured in a facility focused on rigorous quality control. It meets product environmental and EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) compliance. Our detailed testing and refining process will be made publicly available on our GitHub page: https://github.com/functionland.

Who We Are

The Functionland team includes skilled professionals working in AI research, software development, commercialization, user experience, PCB design, product design, marketing, finance, and branding.

Advisory Team

Partners

Meet the team

We founded Functionland because we felt increasingly cheated by cloud providers. It felt bad enough that they track our behavior, claim ownership of our private data, and engage in other questionable business practices. For the people at Functionland, everything changed the day a well-known provider changed terms without notice. This provider had promised the world free-forever photo storage, then used people’s personal photos to train its AI. Suddenly that was no longer enough. The provider decided to charge everyone a monthly fee.

In response, we began developing Fotos—a privacy-focused replacement for photo storage that anyone who has a personal server can run for free.

Our Fotos application gained huge support and is currently ranked in the top 3% of GitHub projects worldwide.

But we soon realized one app wasn’t enough. Not everyone has the knowledge and time required to own and maintain a personal server. They are difficult to set up and hard to keep running. Even when they work, personal servers don’t offer all the functionality you can get from the cloud.

We realized that free open-source cloud service alternatives were being held back by the paying problem. As long as there are cloud hardware landlords, users and developers will be forced to pay rent. We can never be free.

To solve this, we began creating an alternative platform, one that provides the same ease and broad potential people find in the cloud. Our solution is Box: a low-cost, plug-and-play hardware.

As developers and open-source contributors, we also saw how funding issues limited the full potential of open source. We wanted to create a platform that enabled open-source contributors, who provide value to millions of people around the world, with a way to finally be compensated for their work.

We have also onboarded some of the biggest names in Web3 as investors and/or partners in this journey, including Protocol Labs, Dfinity, Cudos, Filecoin, Techstars, DoraHacks, Crust Network, Outlier Ventures and Master Ventures. Many others – too many to name! – have provided funding and support for our project.

In the past, there have been other attempts to create a people-powered alternative to cloud storage and services. But they were too restrictive. They were owned by centralized companies. They ran on closed-source hardware. And the technology was still immature, hindered by a lack of smart contracts necessary to enforce agreements in the absence of a central authority.

We wanted to build an open platform that anyone could contribute to and help build. A platform where anyone could access the system using low-cost, energy-efficient hardware. That’s why we created a built-in incentive layer.

The Fula network’s incentive layer turns the paying problem on its head. Open-source developers used to have to pay to host a free alternative to cloud services. With the Fula network, developers, UX designers, and content creators earn for building and creating on the platform. And users get those services for free.

This is the future we are building. Fairer, functional, and free to evolve.

Together, we are stronger!

We believe in the power of people, this is why we want to create the People-Owned Network: a network where every user is also an owner. We need your help to make this dream a reality! Please share the campaign with your friends, neighbors, family, and colleagues, so we can make Box the success we all believe in.

Timeline

Reviews

Get Box—and join the people-owned cloud alternative

• Reclaim your privacy.
• Sync your files and photos on all devices.
• Get polished, free-to-use applications.
• Get Photos, the first free app on Box.
• Files and Password Manager will follow.
• Create, collaborate, and work from anywhere with an internet connection.
• Fully encrypted. Built for security.
• Support open-source development of more free apps.
• Free to use. Forever.

Common Questions

Is this like NAS?

It’s an evolution of NAS. While home server solutions like NAS work for storage, they can never match the convenience and ease of the cloud. They require high levels of technical knowledge and hours to set up and maintain.

Furthermore, with NAS, you risk losing everything if something goes wrong. If you have a hard drive failure, a fire, or a theft, your data is gone. Backups and duplicates have to be managed manually. NAS is mostly closed-source and quite restricted in functionality.

Box, by comparison, is plug and play. It is easy to set up, creates instant backups, syncs with your devices, and gives you access to a new open-source platform with free cloud services and endless possibilities.

Do I have to back up my encrypted data on other people’s Boxes?

No. You can also use your Box as a standalone personal server. The downside is you won’t get the security of duplicate backups that comes with joining your Box to the broader Fula Network.

But Box is also about building creative solutions. For example, you can easily create a private pool with friends and family, linking your individual Boxes so that you each get the advantage of duplicate backups without the discomfort of having your data on other computers. Or you could  purchase more than one Box, install them at different locations, and create your own private pool using your own Boxes.

While an entirely personal solution may feel safer, remember that your data is encrypted on the Box using the AES-256 standard, which means it’s physically impossible for anyone to access it. Your encrypted data is as safe on a stranger’s Box as on your own.

How secure is AES-256 encryption?

Even if someone were able to combine the power of all the world’s computers, it would still take (literally!) billions of years to break into your encrypted data. And even if that were possible, your encrypted data is stored in separate chunks on different machines. The upshot? Even if you gave the world’s most talented hacker a few billion years to try to crack your data, they would be unable to do so.

How does the token system work?

We use a unique proof called Proof of Resource (PoR) to verify the meaningful sharing of resources on the network. This is represented as a token value stored on a smart contract wallet address.

When you use resources from other Boxes, for example backing up data or using an open-source application, your Box automatically pays for this service with tokens it has silently collected. You don’t have to do a thing.

Isn’t blockchain slow?

We do not use blockchain for your files or data. All your backups and data are encrypted, sent, and stored using Web3 protocols such as private IPFS and Libp2p.

We use an energy-efficient blockchain technology for the incentive layer (i.e., the tokens). This creates a hash of actual resource usage (e.g., sharing storage or sharing computing power) and uses this to verify (with zero knowledge) that a Box is doing what it says it is doing on the network.

This ensures a fast, reliable experience that’s as smooth and responsive as the cloud services  you’re used to.

Isn’t Blockchain bad for the environment?

Not Box’s blockchain. Most people associate blockchain with Proof of Work (PoW), which is incredibly wasteful and energy inefficient. However, Box runs on a new kind of fast, energy-efficient blockchain technology.

Proof of Resource (PoR) verifies transactions using your Box’s normal resource usage. That means negligible energy waste. To give you an idea, running Box 24/7 provides you and others with services while also computing the PoR blockchain component. Even then, it will use only a fraction of the energy required by a consumer laptop or PC. With our layer 3 blockchain, you can even choose which parent chain you’d like to connect to, for example Polkadot, Cudos, Polygon or others.

How do the tokens work? Can I earn from running a Box?

As a Box owner, you’ll have direct access to staking rewards issues in $FULA tokens. These can be transferred or exchanged as you wish. While we cannot offer concrete estimates as to how much Box owners can earn until after the Fula Network launches, our goal is to have Box pay for itself within a year and provide returns for early adopters.

In addition to the staking rewards which you can directly access, the $FULA token operates as an invisible layer to track resource sharing and ensure that the Fula Network provides free services and applications for users.

If usage is free, how does Functionland make money?

We sell the Box to individual users, but that’s only part of the story.

The truth is we believe in a fairer future: a world of distributed networks running open-source software. Anyone who owns a Box is automatically helping co-create a valuable service in the form of the Fula Network, where people can share resources. They get paid for providing this service to others. Part of the payment Box owners earn automatically goes to pay for their services and applications, so they get them for free. And those tokens are paid to providers, who help create the valuable apps and services available on the network.

Down the road, Functionland will operate just like other open-source developers: we’ll earn income by creating popular apps on the network we’re building.

Risks and challenges

Hardware: 

Our biggest hardware concern is driven by current global chip shortages. Delays are a risk for us, just as they are for other manufacturers. But we have been offsetting that risk by securing and setting aside the necessary hardware, and we have already stockpiled enough to guarantee we meet our launch target. Additionally, with any hardware there is always the risk of encountering bugs during final testing. If we find any issues, a modification or redesign could lead to delivery delays. (Prototyping the Box hub, for example, has a 10- to 14-day turnaround time.) To offset this, we’re building on open-source hardware and with the support of globally-recognized product designers, significantly reducing the risk of hardware bugs.

Software: 

We are currently building the protocols that will enable Box to form a decentralized cloud alternative. Two of the three major protocols are well underway, with delivery expected by Q2 2022. The two that are almost complete are sufficient to run the features we have outlined in this campaign. The third major protocol will enable new capabilities and will be announced after the campaign is complete, In order to minimize these risks, we have partnered with Protocol Labs, 4ire Labs and other prominent names in web3 technology.

Funding:

As with any new venture, financial stresses and challenges are always a risk. However, we are fully funded to support our crowdfunding campaign by 1.1M seed funding raised from reputable names in technology, such as Protocol Labs,  and we are not dependent on Box sales to reach our goals. We designed our crowdfunding campaign in order to share the results of our work with innovators and the community first.

Despite potential challenges, we are on schedule to deliver our plug-and-play Boxes. Users will Fotos and our Files and Password Manager apps, with additional apps available in Q4 in order to coincide with the first Box shipments. Box’s application stack will expand by onboarding developers into the ecosystem.