Blockchain Basics 2: The differences between major dStorage protocols. Filecoin, Arweave, Sia and Crust Network
Crust Network is part of a growing Web 3.0 industry that is called decentralized storage, but we are not the only project building in this industry. In this article, we will discuss the technology behind the major dStorage projects: Filecoin, Crust Network, Arweave, and Sia. Before we begin, if you aren’t sure what decentralized storage is please refer to our first article “What is Decentralized Storage” as this article will assume you have background knowledge. This article will also not discuss centralized or pseudo-decentralized protocols like StorJ as they go against the principles of decentralization.?
We can begin with non-IPFS bases decentralized storage protocols with the two most popular: Arweave and Sia. Arweave is the second most popular decentralized storage protocol (after Filecoin) which is known for its permanent storage option. Arweave is a “permanent storage” protocol that boasts that any data uploaded to the protocol will never be deleted or lost. The technology behind Arweave is actually very simple. Arweave stores data directly within the blockchain blocks, which developers have actually been able to do for many years. Arweave was able to create a blockchain with extremely large blocks that can hold a lot more data than older chains like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Due to the nature of how new blocks are created in a blockchain, we know that whenever you store data within a block that data can never be changed or deleted, and every node in the network will download the entire chain. This is probably the most secure way to store data, however, it does not come without a cost. Although Arweave has more storage than a traditional chain it will still run into the issue of scalability at high usage. Since every Arweave node has to download the entire chain with all the data nodes need to be very large and will need to increase their storage capabilities over time. Problems with scalability also make Arweave unable to host dynamic data, as once the data changes you will have to make a new storage request. That old data will not be deleted so you will have to constantly be making new purchases. This issue has made Arweave much more expensive compared to all IPFS-based storage protocols. Arweave is still the safest protocol to store any piece of data which you want to protect and store forever, but it has narrow use cases.?
The next famous decentralized storage protocol is Sia, which like IPFS is a network of off-chain peer-to-peer storage nodes. Sia is unique from IPFS because the Sia Network has no mechanism to determine storage price (paid in Siacoin), instead storage requesters must negotiate storage prices with the storage nodes in a file/data storage contract. Siacoin believers argue that this price mechanism makes Sia the most decentralized project in this industry as even the price of storage is peer-to-peer. There is also no current team running the Sia Network. All marketing has been through word of mouth and grassroots community work. However, the lack of a team has also created a lack of infrastructure for the project. Without any UI, storage requesters will be extremely confused when trying to upload a file if they are unable to code. A project called Skynet aimed to fix these issues with Sia by building out a simple website where individuals can upload files they want to store to Sia Network. However the Skynet Twitter account has not made a real post since the beginning of July 2022 (5 months ago at the time of this article), so it seems as if the project may have been abandoned.?
While Arweave and Sia have built out their own file storage protocols there are other decentralized storage projects which are building on top of IPFS. IPFS is the original decentralized file system and was designed by the founder of Protocol labs. IPFS solved the decentralized storage scalability issue by allowing individuals to host data in their unused hard drives (off-chain) and only using the blockchain to organize and keep track of who has what pieces of data. Although IPFS is technologically sound, it comes with some major downsides. Standard IPFS is lacking any kind of incentive and service layer which would reward node operators for storing user data or which would provide users with smart contract-based storage guarantees. This means IPFS on its own doesn't offer users any control about how many nodes will store their data or for how long the node will actually hold on to their data. Unless you want to run your own IPFS node to store your data, defeating the purpose of cloud storage, using IPFS by itself puts you at risk for having your data go offline.?
There are two main IPFS incentive layers: Filecoin and Crust Network. Filecoin was also created by the founders of Protocol labs, so some argue that it is the official coin of IPFS. The core of its technology is built around providing blockchain rewards for the IPFS storage nodes. Blockchain rewards are necessary for IPFS storage nodes to stay active. If storage nodes aren’t getting paid then they have no real incentive to stay online. Filecoin also has a negative rewards system where they will punish any nodes that try to harm the system by charging them instead of paying them. While this solves the incentive issue of IPFS, there are still problems with Filecoin. The PoSt consensus? to prove storage requests with storage nodes is extremely inefficient, making proof speed as long as 1-2 hours. Furthermore hosting an IPFS node through Filecoin can be difficult, users need to stake 50 FIL, and they need to purchase a computer with over 8+ core CPU, a powerful GPU, and a minimum of 128 GiB of RAM. With its slow speed of storage provement Filecoin can only be used for data archiving making it’s use cases narrow.?
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On the other hand, Crust Network sought out to solve the issues Filecoin ignored. Crust uses a piece of hardware included in all modern devices called TEE (Trust Execution Environment) which allows users to host a storage node with a smaller computer and without burning that computers heart drive. Crust has also built a decentralized storage marketplace that automatically matches storage requests with available storage nodes. Also the MPoW (meaningful proof of work) consensus to prove storage requests with storage nodes allows for a faster proof speed of 1-2 minutes as opposed to 1-2 hours. With that in mind Crust Network has opened its protocol to a wide variety of unique use cases such as website and dApp hosting. Lastly, one of the biggest differences between Crust and Filecoin is data replication. Upon upload of your data, Crust will replicate it up to 80 times and place each replica on a different storage node. With data replication as an additional security measure users will never have a single point of failure. Lastly a key difference between all decentralized storage protocols and Crust is the ease of use, and cross chain compatibility. The Crust team has worked tirelessly to make the Crust mainnet easy to connect to from any smart contract platform. Crust has also built multiple dApps like IPFS scan, and Crust Files which allow you to upload data to IPFS and analyze your data with zero coding necessary! With both fast upload speed, ease of use, and data replication Crust can service a wide variety of use cases, and protect against various hacks such as DNS hijack and DDoS attack.??
Each decentralized storage protocol has pros and cons, so it’s important to choose the technology which would work best for your business. However we want to highlight that Crust Network is the only fully decentralized protocol which offers hot storage, and data replication. Furthermore Crust is fully interoperable, so you can actually choose to use both Crust and another decentralized storage protocol at the same time. For example many projects use Crust for frontend website hosting, and Arweave for data archival of specific important documents. If you are looking for the best dStorage coin to invest in do your own research as this article was focused solely on the technology behind decentralized storage protocols. We hope you learned a lot today, and if you enjoyed this article make sure to give us a like and share!
This article was written by Yuvia Mendoza and Patrice Vibert