Dec 14, 2022
Crust Network: One Year of Growth and Partnerships
Just one year ago on September 1st, 2021, the Crust mainnet launched. In the past year, we have achieved many milestones and gained many partners and developers for our ecosystem.
Since the mainnet launch, Crust has fully improved its developer tools and cross-chain storage solutions, striving to create an out-of-box, seamless, and original-IPFS-oriented decentralized storage experience. Crust has also actively used on-chain democracy to improve the protocol layer and create a more affordable and practical storage market.
Overview
One surprising development is that Crust has partnered with over 150 projects! This will help Crust become more rooted in the Web3 ecosystem. Here is a look at our biggest partners in the industry:
Throughout this year Crust has proven that the network can be utalized for various different types of uses cases! Crust launched the Crust Dev Toolkits, which includes JS SDK, Github Actions, Shell Scripts, and IPFS Scan, to meet the integration preferences of different Web3 projects. Currently, Dev Toolkits have been integrated into Web3 projects such as Uniswap, AAVE, Polkadot Apps, Liquity, XX Messenger, and RMRK.
In the NFT and metaverse space, Crust has partnered with RMRK to provide storage services for its NFTs. Crust has sponsored the RMRK hackathon to encourage developers to build NFT DAPPs on RMRK and Crust. Additionally Crust has partnered with other metaverse and NFT projects such as Metaprints, NFTScan, and more.
Crust’s partners span a wide range of fields and together are an important part of the Web3 ecosystem. In this past year, we have partnered with many prominent public chains including Polygon, Heco, Near, Elrond, Flow, BSC, and Solana.
In the DeFi ecosystem, AAVE’s v0.2.0 version has announced it is being supported by Crust. When users first visit their website, they will see a notice about this on the frontend. Previously, Crust also hosted Uniswap’s front-end website. When Uniswap’s official website went down due to a Cloudflare routing issue two weeks ago, the backup IPFS version of the page that they offered was supported by Crust. Crust welcomes more DeFi projects to work with us to solve problems caused by centralized server issues.
In addition, Chainlink has announced a partnership with Crust, providing external adapters for its network nodes to seamlessly use the decentralized storage network for Chainlink developers. We have also hosted multiple community meet-up events with the Chainlink community!
The Polkadot Wiki has now merged with the Crust Storage entry, and there is now a decentralized storage entry provided by Crust on Polkaapps. In the past year, Crust has become more closely connected with the development of the Polkadot ecosystem, with the goal of becoming an important underlying infrastructure in the Polkadot ecosystem. To this point, Crust has successfully acquired both a Polkadot and Kusama parachain slot!
Multiple asset cross-chain bridges have been launched, including decentralized asset bridges from the Crust mainnet to Ethereum, Elrond, and the Crust preview network, increasing the practicality of Crust. It also provides the infrastructure for Crust’s cross-chain storage solutions.
Protocol Layer
In terms of the protocol layer, after the Crust mainnet launched, it immediately supported IPFS CID v1 and completed the design of DSM3.0, seamlessly upgrading the storage market and greatly improving the ability to process order files. As of now, there have been 1.2 million independent files stored on the Crust network, ranking first in the decentralized storage field.
And for protocol layer development, Crust is committed to adding diverse functions to make Crust a more open underlying storage infrastructure, meeting the needs of Web3 ecology for storing valuable data. On the developer side, it will improve the user-friendliness of developers using Crust.
New features mainly include: data indexing services, data encryption and authorization services, identity aggregation and data labeling, MPoW storage proof upgrade, network expansion, and more. Data privacy and identity aggregation (DID) undoubtedly determine the importance of Crust in the Web3 ecosystem, which will make it easier for any user to enter Web3.
A decentralized cross-chain storage solution based on IPFS W3Auth Gateway, IPFS W3Auth Pinner, and Storage Smart Contract has been launched, supporting all EVM-compatible blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, OKX.
This solution also supports non-EVM-compatible blockchains, including Aptos, Near, Chainlink, Solana, Avalanche, Elrond, and Flow. This solution provides a smart contact-driven way to access Crust’s IPFS storage resources, helping these ecosystem users and developers to store data locally, rather than interacting with the Crust blockchain.
If you want to learn more, please refer to: https://wiki.crust.network/docs/en/build101
Dotsama Ecosystem
The Kusama parachain — Crust Shadow has been launched, and the cross-chain storage module xStorage pallet based on XCMP has been designed and developed, and has opened up message channels with multiple parachains including Moonbeam, Acala, Phala, Biforst, Oak, Darwinia, and more, providing storage capabilities for the entire Polkadot ecosystem.
Last month, Crust also successfully auctioned the 30th slot on Polkadot for 71,953 DOT, and successfully won the Kusama slot auction as well. We will continue to provide cross-chain storage services for Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem projects.
In the first half of this year, Crust actively participated in and promoted events related to the Polkadot ecosystem. For example, online and offline hackathons and workshops were held in North America and Europe. From May 30 to July 11, the Polkadot Hackathon was held in North America, and Crust provided a $6,000 prize for the best application based on Crust. Crust also held two online workshops and participated in the offline Polkadot Hacker House@NYC. In September and October, Crust co-sponsored offline events with Manta Network at the Massari Mainnet Conference and with OAK Network at UC Berkeley.
Around the end of September, Crust co-hosted a Polkadot special event at the Berlin Blockchain Week with many Polkadot projects. In August, Crust also participated in the offline Parisdot summit in Paris, France.
Crust will continue to grow and develop alongside the Polkadot ecosystem.
Application
The world’s first decentralized dropbox, Crust Files (crustfiles.io), has been launched, based on the Crust cross-chain solution and supporting the majority of ecosystem accounts for login and storage.
In terms of applications, a low-threshold Web3 personal storage tool, CrustFiles, has been introduced. Users can now use the wallet supported by the aforementioned public chains to log in to Crust Files and store for free.
Recently, Crust also reached a cooperation with Aptos, supporting the login entry of Aptos ecosystem’s Petra wallet and Martian wallet. At the same time, cooperation with Web3Auth adds many Web2 entries to CrustFiles, basically allowing you to log in with applications such as Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even WeChat and Weibo, greatly reducing the user experience threshold for Web3 storage.
Crust is excited to soon release a highly innovative tool that will bring new energy to the decentralized storage field.
Stay tuned!
Community
The Crust community has planned a series of marketing events to ensure Crust’s global reach and impact. In the next stage, Crust will focus on regions such as North America, Europe, and Japan, collaborating with different projects and organizing a series of offline events to mobilize community strength.
These events will help to store more valuable data on the Crust network, and make Crust a more developer-friendly protocol. By collaborating with more projects, Crust will be able to expand its ecosystem and application scenarios, further enhancing the value capture ability of CRU. These technical upgrades will also be reflected in the application layer, improving the user experience.
And now, Crust Network is launching a community rewards program to directly reward those who engage with the community and Crust’s social media accounts. Unlike the Open Community Program, the Community Reward Program is open to anyone, including non-Crust token holders. The goal of this program is to increase activity on Crust Network’s social media accounts and promote awareness of Crust. The program will consist of a monthly “Best Crust Community Member” award and weekly contests. Winners will be determined based on their activity and engagement with the community, tracked through the Crew3 website. The number of winners and the amount of rewards will vary depending on the number of participants. If necessary, the prize pool and number of winners will be increased to maintain a consistent likelihood of winning.
Learn more here:
In short, Crust is continuously growing and providing more support and options for the Web3 ecosystem!
