Crust Network— a new big project in the field of decentralized cloud storage
For many years, cloud storages have been the backbone of the whole Internet infrastructure. The modern Internet contains unimaginable amounts of data — the biggest four platforms, namely Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, store at least 1,200 petabytes or 1.2 trillion gigabytes of information. Amazon S3, Oracle Cloud Storage and Microsoft Azure Storage are the largest cloud solution providers in the world, but there are many others, such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud etc. All these solutions are pretty safe, and the majority of the services we use daily are based on their infrastructure.
There’s nothing bad about centralized cloud storages. Why is it a good idea to build a decentralized cloud service, what’s it’s the purpose? The thing is, decentralized storage can be as good as a centralized one, but it addresses the efficiency of resources usage. What if we combine all unused disk space that Internet users have on their hard drives? Coupled with the small cloud storage providers they can become a good alternative to such giants like Amazon in terms of data storage. Decentralized internet can rely on such storage networks and be able to maintain itself without the help of IT giants. That’s where Crust shines the most.
- Networks with some kind of supernodes that control all operations and data movement in their blockchains and validate everything that should be sent to storage nodes. Examples of such networks or projects are Siacoin, Lambda and Storj.
- A more decentralized approach by Crust and Filecoin. No supernodes, any node can join the network.
- Full redundant storage where all files are stored on all nodes simultaneously, such as Arweave.
Being compared to the other two categories, Crust is a lot more decentralized, but it stands out even in its own category. While Filecoin runs on space and time consensus which requires the zero-knowledge proof calculation and some serious hardware resources, high-end GPU and CPU, which could be very expensive and not affordable for many users. Crust nodes can be run on any home computer, notebook or laptop. It’s a giant step towards decentralization and the popularization of decentralized storages. How does it work?
The three layers of Crust
The main architecture of the Crust parachain consists of three layers, MPoW, GPoS and the Decentralized Storage Market.
MPoW is the mechanism that allows any node to provide storage to the network using the cheapest hardware. To make this happen, Crust relies on the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology integrated into most CPU chips. It’s a safe zone in the processor that can’t be accessed and overwritten, and that’s the advantage used by Crust. The most crucial part of the files integrity check and space check is performed by the work inspector located inside the TEE. It’s completely safe so it’s can’t be tampered with and thus the results of checking by this inspector can be accepted by the whole network without additional checking.
Thus the sequence of joining the network looks like this:
- First of all, a node must be verified. Other nodes calculate its storage according to the declaration from its TEE and send the identity of the new node and its public key to the chain.
- When the node is verified, it doesn’t require additional checking from other nodes. The work inspector in its own local TEE rechecks its capacity and file storage status every 30 minutes. After checking it signs the Storage Work Report in the TEE and sends it to the chain to confirm that everything is still okay with that node.
- If the instance of the TEE is destroyed or the available space has changed, the node must pass the verification again, because its new work report will differ a lot from the previous one.
- When the new file is received for storage, it gets encrypted with the TEE to ensure that even the node owner won’t be able to access and read its contents.
The second layer is GPoS. Anyone who has ever seen a delegated PoS blockchain will instantly understand the concept. Users must stake their CRU tokens to earn the right to produce blocks and get rewards in CRU for it. But it’s not so simple — it’s not enough to have a lot of tokens to stake them. In addition, a node must earn the staking quota by providing storage space. The quota is affected by the amount of storage space and also by files stored in the node. The network encourages propagating many backup copies of the same files to ensure their safety, thus those nodes that store file duplicates get more staking quotas. For example, if 4 nodes store the same file. the quota for each node will be 4 times bigger than the regular one, and if 16 nodes store the same file, the staking quota will be 16 times bigger. Those users who don’t have many tokens and don’t have any chance to produce blocks and receive rewards, or don’t have enough staking quotas, can delegate their CRU to other bigger nodes and receive their share of staking fees.
The last layer is the Decentralized Storage Market. This is the place for creating storage orders. To submit a file to the Crust storage nodes, the user has to upload a file onto a standard IPFS public network using standard IPFS tools or the Crust client. When the file is uploaded, the user gets the CID (content identifier), goes to the Crust Marketplace and submits an order. When the merchants (storage providers) receive the broadcast order information, they can search for this file in the IPFS network and save it on their nodes. With the submission of the storage proof of this file to the blockchain, the order becomes effective and the user must pay a fee for storing the file. The fee gets split, 20% goes to the file storage providers, 80% goes directly to stakers.
Thus, the whole structure of the network can be described like this: storage nodes provide information about their available space and stored files to the network, their internal CPU chips verify it, staker nodes get this information and pack it into blocks.
What’s next?
Currently, Crust is in the active development stage. The team wants to onboard as many third-party developers as possible, so they are focused on the SDK and its documentation. Also, Crust has its own application for uploading files to the network, and the Crust Cloud as a service is also in the plans. The Crust network currently exists in the state of the Maxwell 2.0 testnet for developers, until all specifications for parachains will be carved out. Then it will be able to implement all necessary features to adapt to parachain standards and to move onto the mainnet. Crust is one of the best projects for Polkadot, it got funding from such investors as NGC Ventures, SNZ, HashCIB, DFG, KNS Group and AU21 Capital, and it continues to draw attention as Polkadot becomes more popular, thus we’ll also continue to follow its news.
About Crust
Crust implements the incentive layer protocol for decentralized storage. It is adaptable to multiple storage layer protocols such as IPFS, and provides support for the application layer. Crust’s architecture also has the capability of supporting a decentralized computing layer and building a decentralized cloud ecosystem. At present, Maxwell Preview network is live, and welcomes everyone to join for testing. Crust Network successively joined Substrate Builders Program and Web3.0 Bootcamp, and also obtained a Web3 Foundation Grant.
