Lighthouse — Permanent Onchain Storage

This blog is a condensed version of the talks I gave at the Fil Dev Summit and Filecoin Orbit at ETH Denver in 2024. Before jumping into Lighthouse, we will first go through an intro to Filecoin for those new here. Let’s get started —

Filecoin — The Largest Decentralized Storage Network

Filecoin is the largest decentralized storage network in the world, representing 3000+ storage providers, 40+ nations, and over $1.5B worth of capital pledged into the network. Filecoin adds an incentivization layer to IPFS (Interplanetary File System), which is a p2p network widely adopted in the web3 community and beyond. Filecoin started as a network to onboard the world’s storage hardware to a permissionless network followed by onboarding useful data onto the network and now evolved into a programmable network that enables compute over state followed by computing over data stored in the network.

Filecoin miners are distributed across the world, and they have sophisticated facilities and infrastructure. I had a chance to visit one of the big miner facilities in Las Vegas back in October 2023. These miners can be individuals or businesses and have been committed to the network since the genesis in 2020 and have contributed over 8EiB of storage capacity to the network.

Now let’s move to some more technical details on how storing data on Filecoin works —

Filecoin Storage Deal

• A Filecoin storage deal is a contract b/w a client and a miner for storing the client’s data for a certain period of time.
• The client prepares data to be sent to the miner and transfers via HTTP or IPFS to the miner using nodes like Boost or Lotus. This process can be intensive, and Lighthouse makes it super easy for clients to do that.
• As the miner receives clients’ data, it generates Proof of Replication (PoRep) to verify they received data and publishes the PoRep to the Filecoin network.
• Over the deal period, miners publish Proof of SpaceTime (PoST) so that clients can verify as proof that their data is continuously being stored. A miner not submitting PoST is subject to slashing.

Filecoin Virtual Machine

Filecoin virtual machine (FVM) launched in March, 2023 transformed Filecoin from being just a storage network to a storage network with programmability where developers can now leverage power of smart contracts to build onchain dapps with a powerful underlying storage layer.

Developers could now build anything that they can build on chains like Ethereum and Solana, like NFTs, DeFi, Social apps, etc. Though naturally with a whole data firehose at the base layer — applications and use cases gravitated around data economy likeDataDAOs

• Perpetual Storage
• Staking Protocols
• Compute Networks
• AI Networks
• Retrieval Markets/CDN
• … and much more

Now, let’s discuss what Lighthouse does and how it works

Lighthouse — Permanent Onchain Storage

At Lighthouse, we are building Permanent Onchain Future, which will serve use cases like NFTs, DePin, AI, etc. Our team has been contributing to the ecosystem for last two years and has built multiple infrastructure components important in this direction to reach millions of applications in the future.

Programmable Storage

Programmable storage is a fundamental piece that allows the ability to program storage resources onchain via smart contracts. We have heard about smart money with ability to program value on Ethereum, similarly, programmable storage makes storage smarter and opens up a new ideaspace that developers can build.

Now, one can program onchain storage for

• X Replications
• Y Renewal Epochs
• Z Repair Policy
• with miners M1, M2 …. , Mn located at geographies L1, L2, … , Ln

PoDSI

Miners on the Filecoin network have a sector size of 32 GiB and have less incentive to store a small 1MB file. This is where Lighthouse helps clients aggregate data together before pushing to Filecoin and providing them with a Proof of Data Segment Inclusion (PoDSI) that is proof that your small file is included in the Filecoin Deal. This proof can easily be verified onchain by clients to validate that their data is live on the network

Perpetual Storage

Using programmable storage as a fundamental piece, we can program to preserve data for a certain period of time, which can be a few months to years to even perpetuity, with incentive mechanisms programmed onchain through the power of smart contracts. An onchain pool of funds called an Endowment Pool controlled by a DAO is meant to be a treasury of funds preserving data long-term. Similar to any real-world growing endowment of a university/museum, this endowment pool is plugged into DeFi protocols to further earn yield and grow the pool for storing data for longer periods of time.

Programmable Access Control

Given that not every data a client wants to store has to be public, this is where Programmable Access Control comes in, using which clients can store encrypted data and Program who can access the data via the following onchain conditions-

• Restrict access by specific wallet addresses
• Native chain token balance owned by an address
• ERC20 / ERC 721 token balance of an address
• Time locked condition
• Custom smart contracts

This is achieved by our encryption SDK, Lighthouse Kavach, which leverages the power of threshold cryptography to grant access to an authorized user seamlessly.

Use Cases

Now let’s discuss who uses Lighthouse today and what some of the top use cases we are excited to work with are. We recently crossed 13,000 users at Lighthouse, and now millions of objects are being stored. If you are a developer or a web3 project looking to integrate decentralized storage in your application, Lighthouse is the goto onchain layer serving various use cases like —

NFTs

NFTs are onchain attestation of an image, music, or video file that is meant to be stored forever. Along with?NFT.Storage, various NFT marketplaces, and minting platforms, Lighthouse is enabling the permanent storage of all your NFT data.

AI

The growing success of LLMs requires a sustainable long-term place to store all datasets and outputs. Decentralized storage is the perfect place for that. With projects like?Ocean Protocol?and Eternal AI, we are accelerating the adoption of AI use cases in web3 and beyond

Data Availability

With other blockchain networks like Syscoin and the Bitcoin L2 network—BitcoinVM—we are enabling efficient storage of data availability blocks, headers, and transaction data for low-cost, long-term storage with strong guarantees.

Stay in Touch

To learn more about Lighthouse, visit the?official website, read through the?documentation, or join the community on?GitHub. You can also join the community on?Discord,?Twitter,?Telegram, or?LinkedIn.

You can also connect with me directly by email — [email protected] or?telegram.