Tiered scaling is the future of decentralized storage

By long ·  
2022-12-01


The world is now expanding digitally at a rapid pace, with the rise of the metaverse and various concepts such as NFT, DAO and Web 3.0. Everything in the world is evolving from offline to online, and in this evolution, digitalization is the foundation, while blockchain decentralization is the core.

Whenever we talk about crypto projects, storage is an inescapable topic, because everything in the digital world can't be presented and expressed without the underlying storage technology. However, in the crypto field, the organization and operation mode of projects are mostly separated from storage, i.e. the projects themselves preach the spirit of decentralization, but the storage method may not be decentralized, such as the many metaverse and NFT projects.

If the concept of decentralization is implemented more thoroughly, it needs to be matched with decentralized storage, so decentralized storage has a huge market demand.


Types of decentralized storage

Although decentralized storage has been around for less than a decade, it has already developed a variety of types with very different underlying logic, both those that do not use blockchain technology and those that do. If further subdivided, those that use blockchain technology can be subdivided into two forms: blockchain and storage function coupling and blockchain and storage function decoupling.


1. Not using blockchain

Whenever we talk about decentralized storage, the first thing that comes to mind is blockchain. Because blockchain is the mainstream technology used in the field of encryption, but not all projects in the field of decentralized storage use blockchain technology, such as IPFS.

IPFS was founded earlier, and its vision is to create a more open decentralized network to replace HTTP, the main highlight of which is content addressing and the principle of data "slice transfer" and "block exchange protocol" borrowed from BT network, which makes data retrieval, access, upload and download very fast. Its decentralization is reflected in the fact that data is transmitted through nodes and there is no centralized data control center. However, it is a self-driven network that lacks incentives, and node access and data storage are voluntary and out of interest, so data security and reliability are difficult to guarantee, making it less of a quality storage platform and more of an open data transfer network.


2. Blockchain and storage function coupling

Most of the current mainstream decentralized storage projects are designed to couple blockchain and storage functions, such as Filecoin and Arweave. although the vision, concept and block-out principle of these two are different, the same thing is that both use blockchain to motivate and block-out. In Filecoin and Arweave's networks, only miners who have stored data have access to block-out rights. This coupling makes storage and block-out rights closely linked, but also changes the purpose of storage. For example, in the Filecoin network, the purpose of storing data is more for block out than for storage itself, which makes the Filecoin network store a large amount of invalid data.

In addition, the functional coupling of storage and chain will also impose limitations on the throughput capacity, and the low throughput and high latency problems will be difficult to solve in the future.


3. Hierarchical Scaling Solution

MEMO is a typical decentralized storage project with a hierarchical scaling scheme, which is compatible with EVM and can be linked to any Turing-complete public chain, and it stores smart contracts on the blockchain on the one hand, and links to a large number of edge storage nodes under the chain to store user data. On the one hand, it stores smart contracts on the blockchain, and on the other hand, it links to a large number of off-chain edge storage nodes to store user data, and achieves consistency of on-chain and off-chain data through proof of verification and smart contracts.

Since the storage function is decoupled from the blockchain, the on-chain load, data redundancy, and communication overhead of decentralized storage are controlled, which provides more room for performance optimization.



Why Tiered Scaling is the Future of Decentralized Storage

The Web3 world is poised for explosive data growth, but what form of storage will be able to support the massive data storage needs?

With various consensus mechanisms and proof-of-verification operating together, the security foundation for decentralized storage has been built, but the exploration of availability and data load is just beginning.

The model of storing data directly on the chain is a direct coupling of storage function and blockchain, but in terms of the characteristics of blockchain, this model is not suitable for the future. Because blockchain is an expensive database, data exists directly on the chain, which means that all operational nodes on the chain must store a copy, which is affordable for small volume data, but if it is large volume data, it will bring heavy burden of on-chain overhead and data redundancy to the blockchain. Therefore, the chain is not suitable for storing large-volume data, and the on-chain storage architecture is not suitable as the architecture for large-scale decentralized storage.

As for the other form of coupling between storage function and blockchain, it does not store data directly on the chain but adopts a peer-to-peer order system to store data, but this also does not get rid of the logic of binding block out and data storage together, that is, miners store data for the purpose of block out, so this model is still bound by the blockchain, making usability and expandability limited.


To solve these problems, CYFS separates storage and outgoing blocks and focuses on building intermediate infrastructure that links the on-chain and off-chain worlds. The layered thinking allows different data to get different treatment, with valuable on-chain resources used to store contracts and transactions, and massive off-chain resources used to store users' raw data, while CYFS is responsible for unifying and collaborating on-chain contracts and off-chain transactions.

As an upgraded and evolved version of the Internet, Web3 requires not only data security, reliability and privacy, but also user experience enhancement. Tiered scaling is a major advancement of decentralized storage to explore scaling outward, moving data off-chain and reconverting it into an advantage that

It continues the advantages of blockchain - decentralized transactions - while avoiding its high redundancy and high latency disadvantages.

Therefore, it is foreseeable that when the traditional storage and blockchain coupling model cannot match the future availability and scale requirements, the tiered scaling solution is the future of decentralized storage, and it will definitely become the core storage infrastructure of Web3.