Implementing a public good Polkadot-native system parachain for data storage
Would it be valuable to the ecosystem to have a Filecoin-like native storage offering on Polkadot?
One that uses DOT as the native token and where anyone in the ecosystem through XCM would be able to store and retrieve data. This is mainly inspired by the vision Gavin presented at Decoded 23 about building the Ubiquitous Supercomputer. When thinking about the app-centricity design and the Space and Cores model it will be critical for us to have native storage and not depend on other networks.
This basically extends the Polkadot value offering to include storage, similar to Filecoin, and brings us closer to the supercomputer vision.
We believe it's very important that this work is done as a public good with DOT used as the fee token, otherwise, any dependence on other networks or other tokens would undermine the goals.
Read our full draft proposal here.
We are looking for feedback, how can we improve the proposal?
More links:
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Our 48 page extensive research on how to do this. Read this as it complements this proposal
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Polkadot forum discussion.
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Github repository.
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Eiger website.
Comments (10)
"Public good" is very Communist word-speak. Best not to use that kind of political language. A lot of public bad has been done under the promise of being a public good.
@bobCraddock Fair point. What would you suggestt we use instead to convey that its meant to serve the network and that we don't want to create another token. Is "common good" a better alternative, does it carry the same conotation?
You literally are describing CRUST NETWORK, one of Polkadots OG parachains, providing reliable and native storage services to Polkadot for many years.
Hey @Spezi00l (account created today) thank you for your comment. Compared to Crust:
We don't want to use TEE's
We are not proposing to create a new token on top of which our business model and investor returns would be built upon. This is a network owned solution, a system parachain, not a private endeavour like Crust. We want DOT to be the exclusive fee payment token.
Crust uses IPFS as its underlying storage network, on the other hand this would be native storage provided by the Polkadot storage providers, not the same storage network. In decoded 23 Gavin talked about the Ubiquitous Supercomputer, if you think about the cores and space model, the network can't be dependent on another network, it has to be resilient and self dependent on storage.
I hope this clarifies the difference. While we respect the hard work done by the Crust team, its important not to confuse the details or equate the design choices and value propositions.