EthStorage: Build the storage network of Ethereum by Layer2

2023-03-14 11:24

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原文标题：《 BinaryTalks｜对话 EthStorage，用 Layer2 思路构建以太坊的存储网络》

Interviewee: Qi Zhou, EthStorage

Host: Jenny BinaryDAO

Thank you very much to BinaryDAO for inviting me to talk to you today about the infrastructure we're building around Ethereum -- the EthStorage project.

I myself have been active in the blockchain space of the Ethereum ecosystem for many years, often participating in some of the online and offline activities of the Ethereum community, as well as writing about Ethereum developing improved EIP, so I have been thinking about what the future Web3 infrastructure will look like and what improvements we should make to make Ethereum better, What can be done to make the industry better?

Last year, I spent a lot of time having in-depth discussions with members of Ethereum Foundation on Data Availability and other aspects, as well as doing a lot of research in this field. Fortunately, I got a Grant from them last year. I was mainly engaged in some Danksharding data recovery, error correction and other work, which has been basically completed now. And just two weeks ago, our EthStorage project received a Grant from the ETH Foundation.

So what is EthStorage?

In short, its goals are twofold:

The first is to take advantage of the security attributes of Ethereum, the open ecosystem that has been built with Ethereum. With the subsequent expansion of Layer2, we see many expansion strategies in different directions, including Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup, etc. They all make expansion improvements in solving performance problems of ethereum such as computing, trading, and TPS, and obtain security of ethereum. Another important goal is to use Ethereum's Rollup and Layer2 technologies to reduce Ethereum's storage costs. If you are familiar with Ethereum's storage model, it is very expensive to store. By using EthStorage, we hope to reduce the storage cost of Ethereum to one-thousandth of what it is today and increase the existing storage capacity to more than petabytes.

So how do you get there?

More technical details may be needed here, but the Rollup we are doing is fundamentally different from other Ethereum rollups. Other rollups are solving ethereum computing and trading problems, expanding the performance of TPS, which is the expansion of ETH computing layer. EthStorage is an expansion of the ETH storage layer.

Our core requirement was how to prove to the Ethereum Layer1 contract that we had so many duplicates on Layer2, and that the number of duplicates could be terabytes or hundreds of terabytes or petabytes, and that order of magnitude was very important. For the current Rollup, the storage magnitude is relatively low, including Arbitrum, Arbitrum Nova, which has a high storage overhead. Their storage magnitude is still a TB level, or far from a PB level.

If we can prove on the Ethereum Layer1 contract that the amount of replica data stored on Layer2 can reach a very high order of magnitude, then we can create more interesting applications based on this scaling solution. So this is one of the design goals that we want to do, and based on this expansion you can do some interesting applications on Ethereum.

On the other hand, for Rollup that focuses on computing layer, if they need a long-term storage mechanism, EthStorage can not only be used as a decentralized long-term storage solution, but also can be highly bound to Ethereum and all Ethereum ecology. You can verify all the stored data through smart contracts, which is a very straightforward application scenario.

In addition, we've found that in static web design, decentralized storage applications like Filecoin or Arweave already exist, like Uniswap with a backup of its front-end hosting, However, IPFS and Filecoin's and Arweave's own storage systems are designed to handle only static web site data. Once we need a very rich, dynamic web front end that multiple users interact with, Filecoin or Arweave are hard to fully support.

With storage capacity expansion and computing capacity expansion, if we combine the two resources together, we can take a lot of Web2 rich dynamic applications and run them out in Web3 form, which has a very big application prospect. In the case of NFT, the application is more smooth, in addition to pictures, video and music can use EthStorage as the native storage on its ETH chain.

For users, there is no need to worry about data storage suddenly lost, or there is a server and that server down, so EthStorage can better support all the applications of Ethereum, in order to support these applications, we also developed a Web3 access protocol.

The access protocol for Web3 is a proposal we defined in ERC-4804. What version of this protocol is it? You can think of a decentralized version of HTTP, or a more flexible version of IPFS. First of all, this Scheme is Web3, and its style is actually very similar to HTTP, but the way it locates resources is a smart contract rather than a centralized server.

Why do we need this access protocol?

One of the reasons it's important is that when we have a lot of data stored in Ethereum that can be referred to directly by smart contracts, we need to have a decentralized way to access it without relying on centralized or decentralized services like MetaMask or Infura, You can access it directly with a link. For example, I want to access Vitailk's website, which is hosted on a smart contract, or I want to access a decentralized social network, which is also hosted on a smart contract, and the content data is stored on EthStorage.

Finally, to give a more intuitive example, we are doing some early community experiments in EthStorage. For example, we uploaded Vitalik's blog to a smart contract, and then spent about 0.13 ethereum, about two or three hundred dollars, in fact, the price is quite expensive. But relative to the main Ethereum network is already very cheap, we do it at Arbitrum Nova, a total of 40 megabytes of data, these sites can be accessed through our Gateway.

When you want to access, Gateway is to visit the contract Vitalikblog.eth, and finally to ENS to find the website on the corresponding contract, so this website is hosted in the Arbitrum Nova network forever. Including all the above text, all the sub-articles, all the pictures are analyzed and returned by the smart contract, and in the future when the EthStorage main network is online, the storage cost can be further reduced by 10 times or even 100 times of an order of magnitude.

We've also had some projects at ETHDenver, including decentralized Github and Dropbox, where some of the crazy ideas in the decentralized aspect have started to build on top of us, ETHDevner's field projects all have the opportunity to demonstrate how to use EthStorage to build richer intelligent applications with our builder. This is from the perspective of the whole application layer, to describe what we EthStorage is doing, thank you.