Why is it important?
The world relies more than ever on cloud storage. The need will only increase. Yet a few corporations currently host most of that data.
What does success look like?
The creation of a DStorage solution that makes use, is based on or is connected to the Cardano blockchain, incentivized by a native token.
Key Metrics to measure
Number of participants, peers, in the decentralized storage network.
Number of individual users making use of decentralized storage.
Volume of data stored.
Number of organizations and platforms migrated to the decentralized storage solutions.
New applications enabled by decentralized storage.
Impact on the price of storage when compared to centralized storage offerings.
Challenge brief
The global cloud storage market is projected to grow from USD 49.13 billion in 2019 to USD 297.54 billion by 2027, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.3% during the forecast period.
But perhaps more important than the economic factor, creating a robust, secure and tamper-proof decentralised global storage solution based on blockchain technology would make our data safe, out of the reach of and immune to the whims of large corporations, criminal organisations or leaders of nation-states.
Similar to the projects that already exist storage providers should be incentivised by a token.
Examples: filecoin - <https://filecoin.io/> , arweave - <https://www.arweave.org,> Holo - <https://holo.host/> or the Akash DeCloud - <https://akash.network/>
Possibly start with designing and implementing a system that would allow stake pool operators to attach and provide storage to their already existing machines.
Note:
Considering this is a complex task that is not likely to be accomplished, and result in a functioning decentralized storage solution, in a 3 to 6 months timeframe we fully expect that proposal would seek funds in multiple rounds of Catalyst for successful implementation. As such the proposals to this challenge would need to present a detailed timeframe and roadmap to implement a working solution.
Use case example:
As a key component in the creation of a trustworthy, Cardano based, robustly & elegantly interoperable NFT storage platform.
What use is having the record of ownership on an immutable blockchain, if the work that it points to is no longer accessible? Only the metadata gets stored on the blockchain, if the file it points to is no longer available because the location the metadata leads to is no longer available, the NFT itself would probably loses most of its value, regardless if it’s a piece of digital art, music, or a land lease with attached plans.
Picture how the media would cover the story of an NTF artwork, or possibly even worse, the files attached to the metadata that somebody paid hundreds of thousands of dollars suddenly not being there anymore. After an event such as that, storage permanence would surely become the biggest concern of the general public.
As this is a broad and complex problem we don’t necessarily expect full working solutions to emerge out of this first iteration of the challenge. At this stage, we would consider it a success, if working prototypes emerge, which have the potential to evolve and be iterated upon.
If you have a well-documented and supported solution, and can plausibly justify it, do not hesitate to ask for the entire challenge budget.
