In 2020, with Filecoin’s full-fledged space race to the gradual landing of the mainnet, attention to storage projects has reached a new high. Distributed storage is considered to be one of the future development directions, and it is also a hot concept in addition to DeFi this year. On October 13th, on the eve of the Filecoin mainnet launch, OKEx added a storage project token display area in the market-currency introduction and currency transaction. The first batch of tokens entering the OKEx storage project display area are BTT , SC, STORJ, LAMB, GNX, CVT and other projects.
What is the specific concept of distributed storage? What are the development prospects and opportunities in the storage field?
The following is a detailed interpretation of the meaning of blockchain storage, and takes six projects on the OKEx platform as examples to introduce and analyze the characteristics of their projects and discuss future development opportunities in the storage field.
1. Blockchain storage
Storage is not a new field. There are currently four main types of storage industry: desktop storage, enterprise storage, cloud storage and blockchain storage. With the development and maturity of blockchain technology, blockchain storage has begun to attract more and more attention.
Blockchain storage, also known as distributed storage, refers to a decentralized storage system built with blockchain incentives, and is an effective combination of blockchain and storage systems. The blockchain itself is a distributed ledger and a decentralized database, which makes blockchain technology innate application scenarios and advantages in storage.
When it comes to distributed storage, I have to mention IPFS. IPFS (InterPlanetary File System, InterPlanetary File System) is a content-addressable point-to-point hypermedia protocol that aims to replace the traditional Internet protocol HTTP and create an open network transmission protocol for distributed storage and sharing of files. The nodes in the IPFS network constitute a distributed file system, and anyone can quickly obtain files stored on the IPFS system anywhere in the world.
Filecoin is a project developed by the same team of IPFS, Protocol Labs, which is an incentive layer on top of IPFS, and the incentive mechanism is FIL tokens. Simply put, the goal of the Filecoin project is the entire cloud storage market, using all idle storage resources to form an algorithmic market.
With the development of 5G and big data, the volume of the cloud storage market continues to grow. Under the hype of Filecoin, the storage field has attracted a lot of traffic and funds and ushered in more attention and opportunities. So, what other projects are worth paying attention to?
2. Overview of storage items
1.BitTorrent
BTT is a TRC-10 token issued based on the TRON network. It is an incentive pass on the BitTorrent project, with a total of 990 billion. The goal of BTT is to increase the download speed of network shared content and the life of seed sources through token rewards.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer content distribution protocol born in 2001, with more than 100 million users. It uses an efficient software distribution system and peer-to-peer technology to share large files (such as a movie or TV program), and enables each user to provide upload services like a network redistribution node.
On July 24, 2018, BitTorrent was acquired by the TRON Foundation; on January 20, 2019, BTT was issued on TRON. According to the BTT white paper, users can bid through BTT in exchange for faster download speeds. The tokens will be exchanged with TRX through the built-in wallet. At the same time, users can get BTT rewards if they continue to seed for others with a computer. In other words, “seeding is mining”. The release of the BTT token itself is an empowerment for BitTorrent. This incentive model is very similar to Xunlei’s LinkToken.
·Issue Date: 2019-01-20
·Total market value: ¥1.511 billion
·Issuing price: ¥0.0008
·24-hour transaction volume: ¥617 million
·Highest price in history: ¥0.0126
·Circulation: 659,952,625,000
·URL:
2. CyberVein
CyberVein (Digital Vein Chain) was founded in 2017 and initiated by the Singapore CV Technology non-profit foundation. It is a public chain + consortium chain project that combines the consensus of the whole network and the partial consensus.
CyberVein has built a decentralized system based on DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) architecture and including programming languages, virtual machines, and new smart contracts to realize data management and data value definition. CyberVein has 4 core competencies: DAG architecture improves transaction throughput and the efficiency of massive data processing; pioneered the PoC contribution proof mechanism, and proposed the concept of “contribution instead of mining” to avoid the concentration and abuse of computing power in the blockchain; The programming language Vein and the virtual machine CVVM strengthen data protection; the new smart contract realizes data interaction more safely and efficiently. On the basis of sharing and consensus, use blockchain to carry data, build a trust alliance for your information assets (database), and realize the value of data.
CVT is a dedicated token on the CyberVein blockchain and has been launched on the world’s famous digital currency exchanges HitBTC, OKEx, Bit-Z and other exchanges. In the future, it will be used as a gas (handling fee) for transactions on the CyberVein main chain, with practical applications.
·Issue Date: 2018-04-18
·Total market value: ¥927 million
·Issuing price: ¥0.4455
·24-hour transaction volume: ¥18,394,500
·Highest price in history: ¥1.1002
·Circulation: 1,060,404,496
·URL:
3. Siacoin
Sia is a decentralized cloud storage platform based on blockchain. It splits, encrypts, and distributes the data uploaded or stored by users to various hosts in the network for storage. Users manage data through private keys. On Siacoin, users can “rent” their unused hard drives, which can reduce the overall cost of cloud storage for users. Siacoin intends to compete with some large companies in the industry such as Dropbox, Amazon A3, Google Drive and Onedrive by providing low-cost and decentralized storage solutions.
SC is the universal token of the Sia platform. Users who store files on the Sia platform need to use SC to pay for the service, and the host hard drive rental fee will also be paid by SC. There is no limit to the total supply of SC, all SC must be mined through mining. Over time, the reward for each block will gradually decrease, until around January 2023, each block reaches 30,000SC. This means that SC is different from deflationary currencies such as Bitcoin. SC is an inflationary digital currency.
·Issue Date: 2015-07-03
·Total market value: ¥879 million
·Issuing price: ¥0.0003
·24-hour transaction volume: ¥25,839,800
·Highest price in history: ¥0.7539
·Circulation: 44,893,575,000
·URL:
4. STORJ
Storj is an open source decentralized file storage solution that uses encryption, file sharding and blockchain-based hash tables to store files on a peer-to-peer network. It is committed to becoming a cloud that is censorship-free, monitoring-free, and non-stop Storage platform. In addition, Storj uses block transaction functions such as transaction ledger, public/private key encryption, and cryptographic hash functions to achieve security. In addition, compared with traditional cloud storage services, it will be cheaper, faster and more secure.
Storj founder and core developer Shawn Wilkinson (Shawn Wilkinson)
SJCX (Storjcoin X) is the token “fuel” of the Storj network, which allows users to rent and purchase storage space through the DriveSahre application and MetaDisk. Different from Filecoin’s matching model, Storj adopts a market maker model in which service demanders (customers/users) pay directly to the Storj platform and then obtain services. Service providers (storage nodes/miners) receive tokens and rewards from the Storj platform. This transaction model is a centralized transaction model, which is characterized by high efficiency, but not sufficiently decentralized and transparent.
·Issue Date: 2017-07-03
·Total market value: ¥378 million
·Issuing price: ¥2.7648
·24-hour transaction volume: ¥244 million
·Highest price in history: ¥21.1410
·Circulation: 143,787,438
·URL:
5. Lambda
Lambda is a high-speed, secure, and scalable blockchain infrastructure project, which is similar to the IPFS+Filecoin solution. Lambda also builds its system through a storage network + blockchain incentive network. Lambda’s storage network also stores a file on different storage service nodes by dividing a file into data blocks, and then setting a certain redundancy ratio to improve data security. What is more special is that the Lambda blockchain consensus system partially uses the PoS mechanism to maintain the network ledger. Not only that, the PoS pledge logic has also been applied to the storage miners mining in the storage network.
LAMB is the native token of the Lambda project, with a total supply of 6 billion pieces, which can be used to create memory and storage resources that consume nodes.
·Issue Date: 2019-01-03
·Total market value: ¥223 million
·Issuing price: ¥0.0675
·24-hour transaction volume: ¥38,671,900
·Highest price in history: ¥1.8642
·Circulation: 1,861,111,097
·URL:
6. GNX
Genaro Network, the first dual-bottom intelligent data ecosystem that combines storage and public chains, creates an original SPoR (Sentinel Proof of Retrievability) + PoS (Proof of Stake) low-energy sustainable hybrid consensus mechanism, which improves performance while ensuring safety. Genaro provides developers with a one-stop development platform that can simultaneously deploy smart contracts and store data required by DApps, and provide everyone with a trusted Internet that connects the real world and the blockchain world through data.
·Issue Date: 2017-11-17
·Total market value: ¥33,874,600
·Issuing price: ¥0.8707
·24-hour transaction volume: ¥3,365,200
·Highest price in history: ¥9.0497
·Circulation: 288,934,740
·URL:
3. Prospects of the storage market
It can be seen from the above projects that most of the blockchain storage solutions are based on traditional cloud storage solutions and undergo changes and optimizations. Traditional cloud storage solutions (such as Dropbox or Google Drive) have various limitations, such as unexpected data center bandwidth interruption and data privacy issues.
In traditional centralized storage projects, whoever stores the data has the right to use the data. For example, domestic BAT, foreign Internet giants such as Google, Facebook, etc., all store a huge amount of user data. As a real data producer, The user does not have the right to use these data.
Distributed storage is based on a data revolution in this market. Distributed storage projects are dedicated to solving the pain points and problems of centralized storage through blockchain and peer-to-peer networks. Based on the characteristics of point-to-point and open sharing, distributed storage has some obvious advantages, such as higher security and reliability, higher service availability, and lower storage costs.
As storage public chains and projects have been launched in recent years, after the precipitation of time and the de-bubble of the industry, the value of the infrastructure that truly has commercial landing will be reflected. From concept to implementation, distributed storage will no longer be a castle in the sky, and the future market prospects have enough room for imagination.
According to IDC forecasts, China’s storage market will continue to grow positively throughout 2020, and the scale of China’s distributed storage market will reach US$2.46 billion by 2024. From the perspective of market segments, distributed storage has become the mainstream storage form supporting emerging workloads such as cloud, big data, and artificial intelligence.
However, at the same time, some problems are gradually exposed. For example, after the Filecoin mainnet went live, there was a strike by miners and price diving. We have to think about whether the future development path of the storage industry is clear.
Note: The market value, 24H trading volume, liquidity, price and other data of project tokens are from OKEx market-currency introduction, statistics are as of October 23, 2020.
