Why SINSO? — Pave the way for Web3.0
Why SINSO? — Pave the way for Web3.0
In 2015, Vitalik Buterin put forward the exciting concept of a “World Computer” in an Ethereum whitepaper. Currently, Ethereum has become the most active and largest smart contract platform in the world. Of course, Vitalik did not consciously direct the evolution of the blockchain community and technology applications. However, the Turing-complete nature of Ethereum has given rise to limitless possibilities. Although Vitalik is more focused on the value and impact applications powered by Ethereum will bring, rather than Ethereum becoming the global settlement layer and smart contract decentralization engine, the rapid development of applications like Defi on Ethereum has exceeded his expectations.
So far, Ethereum has been criticized for its high gas fees and slow transaction speeds. At present, the characteristics of the blockchain technology itself do not have an ideal solution to various problems. Both Ethereum and Bitcoin are accused of high energy consumption, and mining activity is restricted in some countries. But, nevertheless, this industry constantly attracts people to study and invest, why is this happening?
From Bitcoin, Ethereum, to Filecoin and the SINSO project, what is the meaning and purpose of the existence of the blockchain, and what is the mission of each project?
These are topics worthy of discussion.
The Bitcoin network, based on blockchain technology, has a strong protective ability and durability. Even if some of its characteristics and indicators have been sacrificed under certain scenarios, it cannot be ruled out that blockchain technology will bring a light of hope to human civilization. Blockchain is used by many non-banking people around the world. For these disadvantaged populations, the application of blockchain has provided a livelihood. Especially in those troubled areas where there are wars, blockchain has a positive impact.
Blockchain solves the problem of “trust” in a decentralized architecture.
Economic common sense tells us that efforts to protect property rights will consume resources. The greater the consumption, the lower the net value of these resources. Blockchain implements its logic of protecting property rights through programs and algorithms, consuming a certain amount of electricity to protect property rights. For example, the SHA256 algorithm is the first time people have used the code to protect their assets. While ordinary people think that Bitcoin consumes too much energy, the seemingly nonsensical part of the SHA256 algorithm is actually its biggest value. Compared to the factional infighting caused by human mistrust, the energy consumed by SHA 256 is nothing. Some statisticians have calculated that since World War II, there have been only 26 consecutive days of peace in the world without war.
If great efforts are made to protect property rights, the net worth of resources will decline rapidly. For example, Singapore has a higher net worth than Ethiopia. Ethiopia has a much larger land area than Singapore, but its net resource value is lower than Singapore’s, why is that? Because Singapore has a clearer and more robust property rights law. Although Ethiopia has more natural resources, the relative instability of the legal and political systems has led to great losses and tensions in the protection of property rights, and Ethiopia will soon lose its absolute advantage in resources. As we can see, there are many poor countries with vast territories. However, only efforts to protect property rights can create amazing value in a limited area.
In various industries, internal frictions caused by trust spending lead to huge waste. One well-known American medical expert noted that if doctors and patients in America trust each other completely, at least 50% of waste can be reduced. We know that America already spends almost a fifth of its GDP on health care, so you can see how huge the medical waste caused by distrust is. The more consumption is reduced by social moral norms, the greater will be social wealth. If human capital can be destroyed at will, people will not actively accumulate their experience, and laziness and ignorance will become the norm in the world. Because social morality is so vague, we cannot hope that the evolution of the traditions of human society can correspond to the modern civilization of science and technology. We see that the blockchain is of great revolutionary importance in the current era and is perhaps the best solution to prevent humanity from gradually falling into the “chasm”.
Although blockchain technology is developing rapidly, it is still a relatively new field compared to other industries.
People have accumulated hundreds of years of experience in electrification and aviation. Once they have mastered certain laws, they will carefully study the practical value of these matters. The incandescent light bulb at Fire Station 6 in Livermore, California, USA, has not been replaced in over 100 years, which suggests that the technology in its iterations will continue to incubate step-by-step practical products, but that doesn’t mean the initial technology can’t deliver value. In the field of blockchain, Ethereum, along with other similar public chains, has mastered the issuance of tokens and Defi DApps since 2016. But at this stage, the concept of the “world computer” Ethereum is still far away.
Currently, most of the data is still centralized. While it probably never occurred to us that centralized data storage was unsuitable for today’s world or during the rise of the Internet, there are more and more signs showing the importance of data assets for the future of the world. Financial assets are represented by bitcoin, Israeli historian Yuval. Harari thoughtfully explained: “The product of the economy of the 21st century is not a factory, not a car, not a weapon, but the human body, brain, mind. What will be the future owner of this planet? It all depends on who will own the data in the future. Whoever controls the data controls not only the future, but the future of life. Because data will be the most valuable asset in the world of the future.”
There is a very important part that needs to be considered — “storing data on a chain”.
Although Ethereum proposed the concept of storage in 2014, it is too difficult to implement it on a large scale due to mimicking the current technical architecture of Ethereum. Currently, even if you need to store a small amount of data in 0.5M, you will have to pay sky-high gas fees, and there is no guarantee that you will succeed.
With the help of data, not only can you increase productivity, but it is also likely to transform life itself, which will lead to the fact that people will fall under the curse of “digital dictatorship”. Individuals are increasingly unable to fight chaebols and big data companies. The development of a “digital dictatorship” continues to breed ignorance and widen the gap between the rich and the poor. Overseeing data ownership is not an easy task, and blockchain technology will face enormous challenges.
Decentralized data storage and data ownership is actually linked to the fate of humanity.
One of the startling questions is: “Does the collected data about my DNA, my brain and my life belong to me, or does it belong to governments, corporations or human communities?”. Using data algorithms to create genetic weapons in the future could be easy — given enough samples, the algorithms aren’t really all that complicated.
We hope laws protect individuals’ ownership of data; while facilitating the private exchange of that data. When data rights can be exchanged, data can be integrated. This is exactly the same model for managing physical assets. If private property rights cannot be exchanged, assets cannot be integrated and society as a whole stagnates. But laws and democracy, even in the developed world, also have bottlenecks — we’d like to think that stories of politicians giving big data companies all sorts of easy and green access exist only in movies or are just anecdotal information.
Some people think that storing data in centralized stores is the most efficient way, and ordinary people do not need to worry about their privacy. However, Hayek clearly saw these shortcomings and suggested that “the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom.” Since data is the most important human asset in the future, there is an urgent need to secure the technical paradigm of data privatization and validation. This is a time when we must deeply link the protection of data ownership with the protection of the freedom of human destiny. By this point, we should have clarified the relationship between data and data assets.
In 2017, Filecoin was founded under the leadership of Juan Benet’s company, Protocol labs. Before the advent of the Filecoin Protocol, Labs had already accumulated many technologies, the most important of which was IPFS — Interplanetary File System. The epochal contribution of IPFS is in competition with “HTTP”.
As you know, the biggest drawback of the “HTTP” protocol is centralization, which often leads to situations where data on the Internet is permanently erased as files are deleted. IPFS is based on a P2P network — data built on IPFS is hard to restrict and the Internet will be more open. IPFS establishes the CID specification. A content identifier or CID is a self-describing identifier addressed by content. It does not indicate where the content is stored, but generates an address based on the content itself. The number of characters in a CID depends on the cryptographic hash of the underlying content, not on the size of the content itself. CID is very suitable for combining with smart contracts to create “programmable datasets”. IPFS is a big shift in the data storage paradigm. Since the birth of the Internet, it has played a role in enlightening human civilization. Since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, there has not been a single large-scale public killing in the world. The dissemination of information on the Internet already controls and constrains people’s behavior in many ways. Nowadays, participants in modern wars are also very afraid of condemnation from the Internet. But this traditional Internet is not perfect, and IPFS is a key change.
Filecoin has a famous project, Starling Lab, a project that explores how to use IPFS technology to “prevent human falsification of history.” During the 78 days between the 2020 US election and the 2021 presidential inauguration, Thomson Reuter photographers used IPFS and Filecoin to upload/store and retrieve photos of relevant events. These records are transparent and immutable, providing an irrefutable and permanent record of this period of American history. There is also “evidence of genocide” — Filecoin keeps records of the testimony of hundreds of witnesses from around the world before and after the massacres. From Holocaust survivors to today’s disasters, these testimonies ensure we never forget. If we don’t learn from this, history will always repeat itself.
Inspired by Ethereum, Filecoin is building a storage incentive layer on top of IPFS. Filecoin must fulfill three important tasks. 1) Proof of time and space: Make sure that the file is kept intact and has not been corrupted within a given period of time; 2) Proof of replication: Verification of the agreed number of backups in which the file is stored; 3) Verifiability: The global Filecoin blockchain can verify evidence and automatically correct errors when necessary. On the Filecoin network, anyone can become a storage provider, and economies of scale can be achieved through shutdown, which is why Filecoin is called the “Airbnb of storage.”
Filecoin is not designed to benchmark AWS storage per se, although it can do so, Web2.0 cannot conclude what Filecoin is all about. Filecoin has become the world’s largest zk-SNARK (zero knowledge proof algorithm) deployment network. Zero knowledge proofs have long been a part of the Filecoin network and will remain a key part of its future development. As more and more data is stored, maintained, and available on the Filecoin network, the ecosystem must continue to provide efficient, cost-effective, and secure authentication solutions. Zero-knowledge proof is a game-changer for the Filecoin network, reducing complex authentication processes to a fraction of their original size without compromising security, reliability, and trust. While we may not be as familiar with these providers,
Centralized storage can keep costs low at small scales, but as the Filecoin network scales, marginal costs decrease. The Filecoin network has created a great example. At the same time, storage prices are set by the market to meet different storage needs. While the incentive pricing model is still in its infancy, it will become more flexible in the future. Combined with FVM, the storage market will have a more flexible pricing model. FVM can also be designed to integrate storage and compute, which is unique in the world — usually we compute data on chains. Next, Filecoin will combine smart contracts and storage. With FVM, you can open the Filecoin Energy Dashboard. and help support the Energy Web Zero platform for buying renewable energy. We must believe that a Pareto-optimal economic model can only be built in a completely market-oriented way.
Now we complain about the efficiency of Filecoin the same way we did in the early days of the discovery of electricity. In ancient Egyptian books, discharged fish were called “thunder messengers of the Nile.” About 2,500 years later, naturalists, doctors, and others in Greece, Rome, and later Arabia were still puzzled by the powerful electrical discharges emitted by electric catfish and Mediterranean stingrays, according to records. Some physicians believed that touching discharged animals could cure headaches. Many people still think of Filecoin in the same way that ancient doctors thought of electricity. Filecoin is still in its early stages of adoption and not fully understood, and we still lack the tools to use it effectively.
Although the Filecoin community is already relatively strong, we are not happy with the status quo. When we look at Filecoin in terms of deploying green applications, we see a lot of downsides, but also a lot of potential and opportunity.” In April 2021, Filecoin announced the completion of capacity building, demonstrating that the Filecoin ecosystem no longer needs not only storage providers, but also a large number of ecosystem application creators. Too much middleware needs to be built for Filecoin. It is these middleware that creates full-fledged web 3.0 applications.
Unlike other blockchain projects, Filecoin can integrate Web2.0 and Web3.0 and carry traditional APPs and DAPPs at the same time.
Of course, we believe that DAPP has a lot of value. Of course, DAPP needs not only technology, but also the support of business and incentive models. DAPP will not develop and grow just like that, especially if traditional industries need to quickly open up the market to Web3.0. What is needed is not only a technical level, but also a revolution in the concept and business model. Bury the seeds of Web3.0 now in soil that can sprout Web3.0. Sometimes we don’t need to rush to succeed. At the right time, when spring and rain come, the seeds of Web3.0 will be able to sprout and grow. Decentralized storage is extremely important for the blockchain world. It expands the boundaries of blockchain and injects new energy into the world of blockchain, so that the market share of blockchain can grow rapidly. Although cost reduction is not currently a priority, the main thing is that Filecoin can satisfy the exciting DAPP experience at this stage. We don’t have to worry about SLA (service level) reliability metrics. Through a transparent reputation system, we can find storage providers that are as reliable or even better than AWS. One of the biggest obstacles is efficiency.
Back in 2018, when SINSO’s predecessor technology team was trying to store genetic data in the Interplanetary File System, they developed middleware to optimize file stream downloads and access efficiency, and to prevent crashes when downloading large blocks of files. At the time, we thought that IPFS was still purely a file storage protocol and not yet ready for large-scale commercialization. But the Filecoin storage network is the future of enterprise-grade storage, which is an essential web3.0 infrastructure. With over 17 exabytes of online storage capacity, Filecoin is now ready for commercialization.
However, at this stage, more work needs to be done and a lot of middleware developed to prepare DAPPs to accept Filecoin, as the adoption of algorithms such as space-time proof has compromised efficiency for the sake of stability and integrity.
The first component that SINSO is working on is SINSO Getway.
As a distributed high-speed cache network, SINSO Getway is built for the current use cases required for Gamefi, VR, AR, video streaming, as well as high-speed CDN and DAPP response, and allows users to quickly interact with the Filecoin storage network. In addition to ensuring decentralization, user data privacy and security, SINSO Getway focuses on improving efficiency at the same time. With a wide application in the Metaverse ecology, it is a key infrastructure that contributes to the Filecoin ecosystem by seamlessly integrating data and smart contracts.
While Filecoin’s job is to store valuable data for people, SINSO Getway sorts, coarse-grains, and pre-processes data before storing it in Filecoin. For DAPP, Filecoin cannot be called directly a hard disk partition or object store — Filecoin has its own data encapsulation logic, such as “proof of space-time”. For DAPP, Filecoin is still on the rather “far side”.
SINSO Getway acts as a distributed “edge store”. We consider smart home, wearable health monitoring devices, automotive networks, AR, industrial IoT and smart transportation as scenarios requiring “Edge Storage”. The first and foremost feature of these scenarios is the need for close interaction with DAPP as the key to an immersive experience. Thus, from the very beginning, SINSO Getway took into account the experience brought by data storage efficiency and created a distributed layer of hot data. Given that hot data accounts for about 63% of global IP traffic, it’s easy to see the significance of SINSO Getway.
First of all, the hot data layer uses the CID (Content Identifier) method to provide the same content matching as the cold data. Especially in the process of transferring cross-chain assets, metadata consistency can be ensured. These features are especially important for NFT and GameFi trading. More and more NFT projects are thinking about the security of data assets. The potential market for NFTs and Gamefi has exceeded $200 billion. Only when ownership of the data on the chain can be truly verified can the parties to the transaction feel at ease.
Secondly, with the increase in the number and types of NFT, GameFi and NFT projects facing great pressure to store explosive amounts of data, many projects are forced to use centralized storage, or their own IPFS nodes and third party services, in order to improve the customer experience. SINSO Getway offers a solution that strikes a balance between efficiency and decentralization. We need to ensure a carefully aligned decentralized architecture for DAPPs across all data access and interaction. The Filecoin network is a pool of storage resources for many public chains, and SINSO Getway can become a bridge that allows more projects to use Filecoin storage resources.
After we use Filecoin to store resources, our next task is data management.
Here, data management is associated with two problems: 1. In the process of transition from web2.0 to web3.0, stimulate each project participant; 2. Conduct programmable data expansion. The development of FVM will offer solutions to these two problems: First, FVM will significantly add transaction types to Filecoin’s storage orders, allowing Filecoin to truly adapt to different enterprise-level storage needs. Meanwhile, we can use FVM to manage Data DAOs.
In response to the first question about data management, SINSO proposed a Donors Network framework that allows all parties involved in web3.0 projects to coordinate resources. For example, participants are differentiated by roles such as data owner, data producer, and resource provider — there is no finer division of roles on the Filecoin network. In the real world, when productivity starts to slow down, developing collaborative relationships often brings important empowerment.
We see a polarized society where wealthy people like Elon Musk are reluctant to donate to the United Nations — that’s what mistrust leads to — he can’t be sure the resources will be put to good use.
The SINSO Donor Network decides to fully address these issues through a trustless mechanism. From this point of view, SINSO not only provides an SDK to solve the problem of data transfer efficiency, but also further optimizes the partnership building within the Web3.0 project. By following the “Build-Web3.0-to-Earn” principle, we make it possible for more people to contribute to the Web3.0 world. In addition, our SINSO DAPP cube product creates an application research and development ecosystem that other project teams can join, so that the contribution of the original team behind each software module is respected and protected. We are committed to building SINSO into an open research and development ecosystem. Currently, technical volunteers around the world are ready, and some have joined us as technical advisors. Whether our tech volunteers are in India, the UK or Austria, we are one tech family.
Filecoin is a huge technical base that spans from the web2.0 ecosystem to the web3.0 ecosystem. For anyone who wants to try building web3.0 applications, there is no need to require them to be able to create brilliant work from the start. All that is needed is to accumulate experience day by day. The next thing SINSO needs to do is connect, connect and inspire. We must use an open mindset to allow more people to join.
The path to Web 3.0 is yet to be determined, but its future depends on the performers and young people of our time.
When global international relations become increasingly tense and ignorant wars become frequent; when hunger and food crises begin to appear; when social justice is increasingly threatened and the freedoms of some people are plundered; we should be warned that the curtain on the industrial and internet economy will be darker than the glare of the setting sun. And we will focus on the current infrastructure to create a better world with a strong Web3.0 vision.
Moreover, what Web3.0 creates will never be “warm sunshine” but “lightning and thunderstorms.” In Earth’s history, only lightning and volcanoes could create new marine life. SINSO will be the builder of Web3.0 and the witness to its evolution. Let’s work together!
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