Meet DisBalancer: decentralized system to ensure DDoS resistance

5 min readMar 18, 2021

DisBalancer, the second project to enter the Hacken Foundation, is a solution aimed at protecting companies against DDoS attacks while enabling users to earn tokens by renting out their free computing power and bandwidth to the network.

DisBalancer’s innovative idea has been already recognized by the Hacken community. The project was awarded a Special Prize during the First Grey Hat Hackers Ideas Competition. The event drew the attention of 150 innovative projects among which 3 winners were selected and 2 projects won the Special Prize, one being DisBalancer. The main idea of the event was to reveal talented individuals striving to implement their “grey” projects to benefit the global digital community.

“The launch of DisBalancer project is a further step towards the Hacken Foundation’s market growth. Anti-DDoS tools should be easy to use and accessible to small website owners. DisBalancer allows everyone to participate in a joint big mission — make the digital world a safer place. It is a product that creates real value by solving fundamental problems”, — Hacken CEO Dyma Budorin

DDoS attacks and their impact on businesses

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have become a widespread problem in the virtual environment. Hackers attack companies by overloading their servers with requests thereby affecting their functioning. These attacks result in both financial and reputational losses for victims and, thus, constitute a common cyberwarfare instrument applied to beat competitors. The severity of these attacks is increasing in parallel with a surge in Internet traffic. Businesses should clearly realize that it is better to prevent such attacks than deal with their implications.

The cost of one DDoS attack for the average-sized business may reach $40,000 per hour. However, this figure may be even higher depending on the nature of the business of the victim company. In August 2020, the New Zealand Stock Exchange was hit by a series of DDoS attacks that resulted in the shutdown of its operation for 3 consecutive days. To better realize the potential damage from these attacks, the daily value traded on the Exchange in question is close to $260 million. However, the core reasons for this attack were related mostly to network capacity rather than network security. As more companies go to the cloud, the severity of DDoS attacks is likely to increase.

The underutilization of global computing power and bandwidth constitutes one of the reasons for the occurrence of DDoS attacks. In the modern digital world, there are many companies vulnerable to DDoS attacks. On the other end, we have users that have access to modern computers and smartphones with resources that are not fully utilized. These two sides cannot find each other. As a result, companies have to spend significant financial resources to purchase digital security services from third parties while the free security capacity existing in the market is not used, and in the end, goes to waste.

Introducing DisBalancer: a breakthrough solution to prevent DDoS attacks

DisBalancer is a decentralized system that can be joined by every owner of smartphones or personal computers. The solution developed by DisBalancer provides for forwarding traffic through nodes combined in a special decentralized network. The network will have the capacity to handle many gigabytes of connections per second so that customers’ resources will run smoothly. Every individual will be able to deploy his own node and connect it to the main node. Each continent will have its own main node. As a result, in case a hacker attempts to commit a DDoS attack against a particular website connected to the network, he will fail to overload the website, preventing a denial of service since the requests will be distributed among the components of the DisBalancer network.

The owners of mobile phones and personal computers will be rewarded for joining the network by earning tokens. By connecting to the deployed node an individual will allow the network to access the unused resources of his devices that would otherwise go to waste. As a result, these individuals will rent out their unused bandwidth in exchange for disBalancer Tokens, called DDOS.

The users of devices will be able to sell the accrued tokens to websites interested in preventing DDoS attacks and the latter will use the purchased tokens to get cybersecurity services provided by disBalancer.

To join the ecosystem users will simply need to download the required software and run it in the background. Generally, the cybersecurity solution provided by the project will constitute a cheaper alternative for companies striving to become DDoS resistant when compared to traditional cybersecurity methods due to in-demand nature.

DisBalancer roadmap

The project is going to implement its solution in 4 stages.

The first stage provides for the development of a viable product and the pre-sale of tokens. The security and blockchain integrations and the alpha launch of the product will also take place during this stage.
The second stage provides for network commercialization. The launch of active marketing campaigns, articulation of the farming plan, and collaboration with Red Team specialists who deeply realize the mechanism and nature of DDoS-attacks targeting websites will take place during this stage. New features to the product will also be added during the second stage that will end up with the product’s beta testing.
The third stage provides for adding some additional functionality to the network such as multi-pool support and the development of a content delivery network (CDN). The mobile application will also appear during this stage.
The fourth stage provides for the ultimate launch of the project.

About Hacken Foundation

The main objective of the Hacken Foundation is to give breakthrough crypto projects a chance to scale their solutions in the market. Only projects that bring visible value to the security of the crypto world and adhere to the principles of business ethics are allowed to offer their services on the Hacken Foundation platform. All projects pass a strict pre-approval procedure before entering the Foundation so that potential investors may be absolutely confident of the projects’ transparency and protection of their assets.

Hacken strives to see more projects entering our Foundation. We are focused on ensuring the organic growth of our community through mutually beneficial cooperation. Our road to 1 billion has just started and we strongly believe that disBalancer will become an important element of our sustainable success in reaching this goal.