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title: What is Lume?
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`What is Lume?` This is something we have often asked ourselves to explain it 😅.

Lume can be broken down into a few major focuses:

- Lume is a **P2P network** that uses public keys instead of torrent hashes to access peers and content.
    -  Like a BitTorrent, but ready for Web3.  You can also see it to be a bit like IPFS which uses Libp2p, but more light weight.
        - The goal here is to create a bridge P2P network `to service all of Web3`.
        - `It's NOT a blockchain`. You don't need one since anyone can provide services with RPC or their own custom protocol, and anyone can query them.
- Lume is a **storage portal** (think `L2` in blockchain terms).
    - It builds on Sia and stores your private data, and eventually public. In other words think of it like a paid IPFS service, but its not IPFS.
- Lume is the **end user gateway**.
    - It is how you will interface with all content networks, blockchains, or other nets in the future. This could be a browser extension, web browser itself or anything in-between.