Nuvola Digital Interview

In this interview, Raul De Benedittis, CEO and co-founder of Nuvola Digital and Vola Network, shares how his background in aerospace, naval, and medical quality assurance led him to the world of blockchain and decentralized infrastructure. Raul explains how Nuvola is building decentralized storage and compute solutions that prioritize privacy, security, and data ownership, while making the underlying technology invisible to everyday users. He also discusses why the team chose Cardano as their settlement and security layer, how encrypted data is distributed across a global network, and why they believe DePIN can bring meaningful real-world utility to the ecosystem. Curious to learn how Nuvola is approaching decentralized cloud infrastructure and what role Cardano plays in that vision? Let's dive in!.

Hello Raul, it’s great to connect with you. To start, your profile highlights over a decade of experience in quality engineering in the aerospace, medical and naval industries before entering Web3. Could you please introduce yourself and share what specific inefficiency you saw in that "heavy iron" legacy infrastructure that made you realize, "We need to rebuild this on a blockchain"?

My name is Raul De Benedittis, CEO & Cofounder at Nuvola Digital & Vola Network. My background is in engineering in the aerospace, naval, and medical industries, specifically in quality control and assurance. I always dealt with global supply chain logistics and services, which are all interconnected.

The one industry within blockchain that really sat with me over the last few years was Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN) and Real-World Assets (RWAs). It involves the actual physicality of a business merging with blockchain elements. Coming from a heavy auditing and quality assurance background, I saw immense opportunity because there is so much room for improvement in those legacy systems as a whole. I carry that high standard into everything we do at Nuvola.

On a personal level, what motivates you to keep building in the Cardano ecosystem specifically, and when you step away from the screens and server racks, how do you decompress?

I'm a long-standing member of the Cardano community since 2018. I started as just an investor and worked my way up to a project founder. The growth thus far for Cardano has been an incredible journey to watch, and helping contribute to its success is something I take pride in.

To decompress from the stress of the job, I love the gym. I played football my whole life and have always stuck with fitness, it starts in the mind and the body follows. Outside of that, I’m an avid motorcycle rider, and right now I’m back in my hometown in southern Italy, so spending time on the beaches here is my ultimate decompression routine.

We hear the term "Decentralized Physical Infrastructure" thrown around constantly. Let’s strip away the buzzwords for our readers. If I save a photo to a decentralized cloud versus (a centralized) Google Drive, what physically happens to that data, and why is that architecture safer?

Privacy, encryption, sharding, and file distribution are the main differences in the handling of the file. In a traditional system like Google, you upload it, it is encrypted, but they hold the encryption keys. Your data is essentially only as safe as their centralized servers.

At Nuvola, a photo is encrypted on your device before it is uploaded to Nuvola Drive. That encryption is instantly broken into smaller pieces called shards, and those shards are distributed across our blind node architecture on the Vola Network. Even in the highly unlikely event a hacker cracks a node, all they get is a piece of cipher text. They don't know where the other pieces are, and you can't decrypt a single shard. We don’t hold the keys, they sit on the client's hardware.

There is often a distinction made in the industry between Physical Resource Networks (like wireless coverage) and Digital Resource Networks (like storage). Could you break down that difference for us, and explain where you see the biggest immediate opportunity for disruption?

One is much more physically based. A physical resource network is restricted to a location, you physically have to have something somewhere. We're talking about hardware: grid sensors, servers that run energy grids, generators, things like that. Those are essentially your physical resource networks. They provide power and resources to everything, but they're difficult to scale rapidly because there's a massive physical demand to actually build something, turn it on, and manage it.

Digital resource networks, on the other hand, are essentially the software that runs on top of those physical networks, think storage, compute, and bandwidth. The key difference is that digital resource networks can run through distributed resources globally. Imagine a thousand laptops across the world plugged into the Volola network. That is essentially a digital resource network where those laptops can contribute their unused storage capacity to the network to be utilized.

When it comes to disruption, the difference between the two really lies in the rapid scale at which digital networks can grow. I do want to add a slight nuance to that, though: digital resource networks ultimately depend on physical resource networks, because the physical hardware still has to be present somewhere for the software to run properly. But because of the nature of a distributed model, you no longer need to build centralized data centers with massive server racks. The scaling can happen without some of the heavy physical elements typically required for resource networks. I know that was a lot to take in, but hopefully, that makes sense!

The elephant in the room with decentralized networks is always reliability. "What if the guy/girl running the node in his basement turns off his WiFi?" How does the industry solve this to compete with Amazon's 99.9% uptime, and how does Nuvola's approach to "Robust Node Infrastructure" mentioned on your website address this?

We solve this through sharding, Reed-Solomon erasure coding, shard distribution, and fault tolerencing.

To put it simply, if we use a 4/8 model, a file is broken down and replicated into eight shards. Our system only needs to recover four of those eight components to reconstruct the file perfectly. This means 50% of the nodes holding your data could go offline simultaneously, and we can still recover 100% of the file. For clients needing more redundancy, like the military or pharma, they can pay for additional storage to increase that fault tolerencing up to 80% or 90%.

Your website explicitly states that Nuvola's mission is "Democratizing Decentralized Physical Infrastructure" through a "Crowd-Share model". Could you explain how this model works in practice? How does it allow a non-technical user to participate in the infrastructure economy without needing to buy and manage their own server rack?

This answer actually has two legs to it. We approach it from both sides, starting with the super non-technical side, which is actually the origin story of Nuvola. I started out as the non-technical guy; I didn't know how to run servers or nodes. That's how I met my co-founder, Syed. That’s all he does, he’s a technical mastermind. We essentially brought our two sides together to solve a very real problem in the market.

The first leg is for those non-technical users. If they don't have the capacity, the knowledge, or the resources to run your own servers, they can participate through our NVL token.

The second leg is on the cloud compute network side. The crowdshare model exists there, too, and we are democratizing it through our software. A user can spin up nodes using their own hardware at home, like a laptop; there is no need for a massive server rack. If someone prefers, they could even just rent a server somewhere else without physically buying one, and then seamlessly plug into our network to start providing compute power.

On the Nuvola Digital homepage, you emphasize operating a "Global Server Network" (Global Presence) with servers in Europe, North America, and Asia. Why was it important for Nuvola to own and manage its own hardware rather than just building software on top of AWS, and how does this relate to GDPR compliance?

When we started, we were renting from big data centers, but we quickly realized the dangers of hyperscaler dependency. Between Amazon and Microsoft, there have been major global outages and hacks repeatedly over the last few years.

Europe explicitly wants to break away from these hyperscalers. Having our own infrastructure has been the perfect testing ground to figure out how to scale efficiently and cost-effectively. We even acquired a small ISP in India servicing roughly 15,000 users as a live environment to test our applications directly with households. Ultimately, owning our hardware removes single-point-of-failure reliance on AWS and prepares us for the massive scale and compliance requirements requested by enterprise and government entities.

I’d like to zoom out to your infrastructure choice. In a landscape with high-speed chains like Solana or established giants like Ethereum, why did you specifically choose to build Nuvola on Cardano? Was there a specific technical aspect, such as the eUTxO model or native tokens, that made it the right fit for physical infrastructure?

Cardano's security is simply second to none. I think they still have 100% uptime over eight years, and there have been no hacks. Just the whole model, how it functions, and the way signatures work, it's a safe place. I go on some of these other chains and borderline get a panic attack every time I have to sign something, constantly double-checking to make sure I'm not accidentally giving my permissions away. On Cardano, it just feels safe all around. It's proven, it's battle-tested, and it's tried and true.

With the partner chain model that we've built for our Volan network, we get to tap into that unparalleled Cardano security while still being able to scale on our own chain. We essentially allow ourselves to leverage the robustness, privacy, and security of Cardano, while managing rapid scaling and heavy on-chain data independently without bogging down the main network.

If you're handling tens of thousands to millions of files on a daily or monthly basis, you simply cannot run everything through the main chain. It would be a disaster, uploading a single photo could take 20 minutes. So, by handling the heavy data loads on our chain while pushing subscriptions and financial settlements back to the Cardano chain, we get the perfect combination of security and speed to do everything properly.

Turning that around, how does Nuvola benefit the Cardano ecosystem? We often hear about DeFi or NFTs, but does bringing Decentralized Physical Infrastructure to the chain offer a specific utility, transaction volume, or real-world use case that the network is currently missing?

We bring massive, real-world utility and transaction volume. While Vola Network does the heavy lifting of sharding, downloading, and file reconstruction, the actual financial layer, the paid subscriptions for all these storage services, settles on Cardano. Even at scale, Cardano is going to see millions of transactions flying through us every month purely for payment settlements of a real-world, highly demanded product.

I‘d also like to touch on the "Nuvola Drive" product. In your Medium article "Introducing Vola Network" you mention that Drive will provide a "unified aggregation solution" for Web2 and Web3 storage. What does this mean, and how does this simplify the experience for a typical user? Also, will users be able to seamlessly switch between different storage providers depending on their needs for speed or privacy?

Our approach to that actually evolved through some trial and error. Originally, Nuvola Drive was going to be a multi-store solution where users could choose between different subscriptions from various third-party providers. But we quickly realized that exposed us, and our users, to way too much third-party risk. If a provider had security issues or poor audits, we couldn't absorb that liability.

So, we pivoted to using our own internal Volola network cloud compute and storage model. By acting as the storage provider ourselves, we are 100% in control. If something goes wrong, we can fix it on the spot instead of waiting on a third party's support ticket.

Because of this, our "aggregation" is now more about a seamless migration from Web2 to Web3. Nuvola Drive acts exactly like Google Drive or Dropbox. You would never even realize it's being powered by the blockchain. There are no wallets to set up, no seed phrases, and you don't have to buy tokens on a DEX to activate a subscription. You just log in, pay for your subscription, and it works. All the blockchain magic, the sharding, the distribution, the file reconstruction, happens completely outside of the user's line of sight. We even have tools in place so people can migrate their files directly from Google Drive over to Nuvola Drive.

To answer your question about switching providers: down the road, we do still want to offer an aggregation feature as an additional backup or mirroring layer, like letting you replicate your files onto Filecoin, for example. But we will only bring in third parties once we have extremely strict compliance, audits, and legal contracts in place to manage that risk properly.

In that same article, you introduced Vola as a separate "Partner Chain." For our readers who may not be familiar with the terminology “partner chain”, can you briefly explain what that is ? Also, from a technical perspective, why was it necessary to build a dedicated chain for this? And lastly, what specific role does the Vola Network play in aggregating resources that couldn't be done on the main layer?

Yep. So, for those who don't know, the partner chain model is exactly what it sounds like, it's a partner to a main chain. A lot of Layer 1 blockchains get stressed, bogged down, or slow when too many transactions hit them simultaneously. I'm not the most technically layered guy, but I understand the high-level functionality. Essentially, the problem a partner chain solves is taking specific workloads off the main chain.

Let's use Cardano as an example. We talked about it briefly before: there is massive trust, and it's almost impossible to hack in any way, shape, or form. There has never been an outage, and there has never been a hack; it's impenetrable. But with that level of security comes a trade-off in speed. If too many transactions hit the chain, it slows down immensely. We saw this a lot in the early days with decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and swaps, and it was a nightmare.

The partner chain model takes some of that workload off the main chain while still absorbing its underlying security and core functionality. In the case of the Volola network, it was critical for us to build a cloud compute partner chain because we expect tens of thousands, and eventually millions, of files to be uploaded simultaneously throughout the day.

As we scale, all of those transactions need to be recorded on a chain because they are blockchain-based, this is essentially on-chain proof of storage. Pushing all of that data directly to Cardano would be a disaster; it would take an hour just to upload a photo, which is insane. So, our partner chain takes on the heavy lifting of file transfers, file sharing, and file creation on the side. What it actually pushes back to the main chain is the financial layer, which is where that top-tier security is absolutely essential.

Looking ahead to late 2026 and beyond, how do you envision the user experience evolving? Have we reached a point where the underlying decentralized infrastructure is invisible, and users just enjoy high level of privacy?

The best technology is the technology you don’t even know exists. Think of a combustion engine: you turn a key, and it just works to make your life easier despite its immense internal complexity.

Blockchain has historically been burdened with complexity that scares people off. The whole point of Nuvola Drive is that the decentralized infrastructure is invisible. You upload a file, and in the blink of an eye, it encrypts, shards, distributes, and reconstructs without you ever seeing the backend process. If a solution doesn't make a user's life easier, they won't use it. Simplicity has to be at the forefront.

If you could go back to day one of Nuvola Digital, knowing what you know now, what advice or insight would you give yourself about building physical infrastructure on a blockchain?

If I were to do it all over again, I would prioritize building the Vola Network from the start, rather than trying to rely on aggregating third-party services. Experience showed us the liability of that approach, so we immediately shifted to developing our own backend solution. As a result, I'm confident in saying that we are now positioned to offer the most competitive cloud compute service within the blockchain space.

Thank you for sharing your story. To wrap up, can you tell us who’s behind Nuvola Digital, and where can readers follow your progress or get involved?

• Raul De Benedittis (CEO & Cofounder at Nuvola Digital & Vola Network) - @NuvolaDigital
• Syed Abdul A. (CTO at Nuvola Digital) - @iamSyedLanka
• Website: https://nuvoladigital.net/