Crust Network: decentralized storage protocol for Polkadot
Data storage and cloud services are really important in today's internet world. With blockchain technology coming into this space, the data can finally be secured using a decentralized platform such as Crust Network .
Curst Network is an incentive layer protocol for decentralized storage within the Web3 ecosystem. Its multi-layer architecture can support decentralized computing layers and also build a decentralized cloud blockchain technology that values data privacy and ownership.
Crust is adaptable to distributed storage layer protocols such as IPFS (Inter Planetary File Systems), P2P network architecture such as DAT and DHT technology (Distributed Hash Table).
What is Crust Network?
Crust Network decentralizes data storage by distributing them into the different nodes within the network. Crust Network has two main goals to solve — Crust Cloud and storage for DApps.
Crust Cloud
Simply, Crust Cloud is a decentralized place for your data. Users can easily download and upload files similarly as they can now do it in Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud, but in a decentralized manner — meaning that they are still owners of the data.
Crust Cloud is based on the Crust decentralized storage protocol and provides encrypted wallets, staking, and cloud storage. In the future, it will bring the data market as well.
File storage for DApps
New DApps are being created every day and most of them have large data requirements. Developers and individual businesses need to store the data in a secure way as well as they need them quickly and easily at hand. Crust provides fast and inexpensive storage, especially in comparison to current cloud providers such as AWS.
Crust Network Consensus
Crust uses GPoS (Guaranteed Proof of Stake) consensus model and also MPoW (Meaningful Proof of Work).
GPoS use storage resources as a guarantee. Each node is required to provide storage space to make the staking process possible.
Crust Network is based on Substrate and it follows BABE & GRANDPA mechanism. The security is improved by the fact that the attacker needs to have a lot of Storage resources besides just owning CRU tokens to act maliciously.
MPoW is not a consensus, it’s an off-chain workload report powered by Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to inspect storage work and generate work reports within TEE, and then upload the report to the chain.
On top of MPoW workload reports, there is a GPoS consensus. GPoS is derived from Polkadots NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake) consensus and it generates blocks and distributes block rewards that are based on MPoW workreports. It follows two main directions — environment direction and workload direction.
Team
Two co-founders are Leo Wang and Bova Chen. Leo Wang has previous experience in distributed storage and cloud computing, Bova Chen used to manage several funds as an investment director.
Partnerships
Crust Network will provide decentralized storage technology for Plasm Network, which is a Layer-2 scaling solution. Besides this “Polkadot ecosystem cooperation”, Crust will be cooperating with Maskbook, blockchain platform FLETA and 3Commas.
Token
The native token of Crust Network is called Crust Token=CRU. It has several different use-cases including:
- Payment for storage services
- Data storage trading
- Staking
- Fee payment
- Voting
- Governance
Initial Supply is 20,000,000 CRU
Besides CRU token, there are CSM (Crust Storage Market) and Candy tokens, that might be used in activities and marketing promotion.
Conclusion
Storing sensitive data in big, centralized data silos is not ideal. On the other hand, blockchains are too slow and inefficient for storing large amounts of data and also suffer from scalability issues. Privacy on the blockchain might also be a problem because sensitive data are accessible to the whole world, even if they are encrypted.
So, there is where Crust Network comes into play. Based on the Substrate, Crust will be interoperable with all Polkadot ecosystem projects. It will provide decentralized cloud storage for the whole ecosystem, not just Plasm Network, with whom Crust has already closed a partnership. Crust supports multiple storage layer protocols such as IPFS and DHT. It leverages TEE tech for storage work validation and Polkadot’s Substrate tech framework for the chain. It aims to build a decentralized cloud ecosystem that values data privacy and ownership.
Crust Network has a few advantages that need to be mentioned. They have low hardware requirements, fast data sealing (now <60s for 32G data) so that means a better user experience. And the integration to the Polkadot ecosystem will resolve into simple integration with Web3 DApps in the future. Crust is also privacy-oriented because all the data are encrypted, secured, and sovereign thanks to the TEE technology.
Crust Network will be one of the first projects that would like to secure a parachain slot on Kusama. We are very excited to have this project in the ecosystem and we believe it will be one of the first slot winners!
If you like this article, consider supporting us by changing your present Kusama validator to POLKADOTTERS
Stay tuned for further information about the Polkadot ecosystem projects here on Medium, our Twitter channel Polkadotters as well as in our Facebook Group Polkadot unofficial! If you are feeling really generous, you can send some DOTs to our donate address 🙂
16etYNuwvwbZYxy4FifqMq4KwZCMVSmTJ4XtE3WE3Cn1fQRQ
