While Bitcoin's purpose is a currency, MaidSafe, according to its homepage, is "a fully decentralized platform on which application developers can build decentralized applications. The network is made up by individual users who contribute storage, computing power and bandwidth to form a world-wide autonomous system."
Contrary to Ethereum, Maidsafe doesn't use Block Chain within it's technology infrastructure.
When you join the MaidSafe network, a public key-pair is created for you. Each node you create will have its own public key-pair based off this one (so that they all belong to "you"), and your master key-pair can invalidate any of them at any time.
For the average user, your personal computers and devices will be your only nodes. As soon as one of your node comes online, it will automatically be assigned a completely random ID in addition to the key-pair. The pool of available IDs is astronomically large: (2512 - 1) to choose from!
That's more than all the atoms in the universe combined. Your personal identity is not tied to this ID in any way, thus you remain anonymous.
See the article on How Maidsafe compares to Bitcoin 