Full control over data, security, privacy, and immutability through decentralized cloud storage.
By Sebastijan Eder
Entrepreneur, Investor, Blockchain & Crypto enthusiast, Tech fan. Moving forward! www.0cventures.com
PREFACE
This is PART 2 of a 3-part fundamental overview article of 0Chain, an enterprise-grade decentralized cloud storage solution, one of the most ambitious blockchain projects in crypto that will play a foundational part in the new WEB3, and “fair data” economy.
PART 2 — how and why 0Chain technology is far superior to anything currently available on the market.
PART 3 (the fun part) — we’re going to take a look at the very interesting $ZCN token economics, discuss why $ZCN is an asset with non-speculative value 0and think about the potential in terms of adoption and future ZCN token price.
Enjoy!
PART 2–0CHAIN TECHNOLOGY AND WHY IT’S SUPERIOR TO OTHER DECENTRALIZED COMPETITOR
Even though I recognize that there are many players in the decentralized storage market (Filecoin, Sia, Storj, Arweave, Crust, or others), I believe 0Chain has the upper hand. 0Chain is purposefully built for the Enterprise market, which is the biggest and most performance-demanding data market, while still catering to other less demanding markets such as retail and archival.
NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
0Chain is an entire ecosystem built from scratch. It borrows and expands on the model-view-controller (MVC) design concept. 0Chain has two co-existing networks: the storage network (blobbers) and the consensus network (miners, sharders). The consensus network is responsible for block propagation, state storage, and serves as an access controller to the storage network. The consensus network can be thought of as a Storage-View-Control (SVC) layer.
This separation of duties allows for two networks to scale independently of each other yet interdependent economically through the ZCN token whose value is driven by the amount of data stored on the storage network by clients and users, the storage capacity provided by Blobbers (storage providers), as well as the stakes put upfront by the miners (and sharders) to participate in the consensus network.
Furthermore, this separation allows 0Chain to provide a DSN (decentralized storage network) with features that are customary of centralized networks yet still closer to the edge and consumer than centralized services which typically gravitate into remote locations to save on cost. This in itself makes the 0Chain storage layer a solution candidate to IoT data, which needs expansive and cheaper storage at the edge, as edge storage is at a significant premium today to core cloud (AWS, etc).
If you want to go into details you can read up more in the whitepapers here.
0CHAIN DECENTRALIZED STORAGE FEATURES
ENTERPRISE-GRADE | A LOCAL GLOBAL CLOUD
0Chain also aims to utilize spare (or dedicated) capacity in data centers across the world. There are over 50k MSPs (managed service providers) in the US alone, over 150k globally with some % of idle hardware. The pitch is simple: “We enable you the possibility of a new revenue stream by utilizing your idle resources”. Not a hard sell. This approach also allows for flexibility, and consequently a much wider range of use cases than the competition. 0Chain can serve any market and is suitable for the storage of static data as well as dynamic data which requires high ingress and egress traffic. It is able to accomplish this with high efficiency and much lower costs than its centralized counterparts.
BEYOND IPFS AND OTHER SOLUTIONS
DECENTRALIZED STORAGE PROVIDERS
Projects based on IPFS (interplanetary file system) like Filecoin, Crust, and others are very limited in regard to their use case, as they are only suitable for archival storage, which is static data.
Sia only challenges the nodes storing the files at the end of a contract, not on an ongoing basis during the time they are stored. This means one can provide a storage service but not respond to data requests in between, limiting its use case. Due to poor quality nodes that cause significant node churn, Sia is facing serious performance issues. Utilizing the spare capacity of private computers around the world has proven not to be ideal for the enterprise market.
Storj breaks down the data into a lot of pieces which makes it solid for consumer service providers and not really meant for enterprise-grade storage. It also lacks transparency due to its high reliability on centralized satellites. This somewhat stomps the nature of decentralized ethos.
There is a well-researched paper made by Sculptex going in-depth into the tech comparison of different storage projects, including those mentioned above. Read the article here.
CENTRALIZED INCUMBENTS
Centralized cloud storage solutions (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) are currently the most convenient and scalable options for data storage. But the problems are clear, lack of security, privacy, people not owning their own data, as well as high costs, especially for large amounts of storage retrieval.
There is no exclusion of centralized clouds offering 0Chain solutions to their customers. In fact, 0Chain is an advanced AWS technology partner. 0Chain Github repo includes a docker.aws section which enables an easy deployment to AWS infrastructure if needed.
0Chain also partnered with Oracle and can solve a pretty darn real pain point for enterprises, like GDPR/CCPA compliance. Liability costs are very real and growing, just ask Google.
ENTERPRISE ADOPTION — FROM PRIVATE TO PUBLIC NETWORK
Its common practice for large enterprises to be careful about big changes. They experiment on private “sandbox-es” then gradually transfer to more cost-effective public networks. This process helps them get comfortable with the immediate benefit of a high-performance blockchain like 0Chain’s without taking on significant security risk. 0Chain is already working with a Fortune 100 enterprise that will migrate to the public network once they spin up their mainnet. I anticipate this event will force others to follow, as the public network benefits are enhancing enterprise competitiveness.
You can read a good article on 0Chain from an Enterprise perspective here.
SOLID CODE | 4 YEARS IN DEVELOPMENT
In December 2020, 0Chain mothership repo was released to the public which indicates the scope and ambitiousness of this project. Over the last four years, the team was busy working and producing gigantic results compared to projects with significantly more funding and developer power. Public and private Github repos include more than 7000 commits that will eventually become open-source.
STREAMING CAPABILITIES
Did I mention 0Chain is the only decentralized storage capable of streaming? Imagine content creators being able to own and control their own content, collecting 100% of royalties, zero middlemen, enabling them to restrict access to selected groups, while having a cheaper hosting cost to be online. Hello gamers, YouTubers, podcasters, and other influencers, artists. 0Chain is here to cater to your needs!
More details about streaming in this article!
0CHAIN PRODUCTS
- 0ChainNet: enterprise-grade, high-performance blockchain-based data storage platform, architecturally designed for privacy and security in mind (unlike current infrastructure). Developers can leverage 0ChainNet flexibility to develop any kind of blockchain, enterprise, or consumer application.
- 0Stor: IT stack agnostic public version of high-performance decentralized storage solution for enterprises and blockchain projects.
- 0Stor Private: a private environment for enterprise onboarding, before they can move to a public network, which brings cost-related advantages. 0Stor Private enhances their offering and token usage down the road while enabling users (enterprises) to familiarize themselves with this data architecture.
- 0Lake: a data privacy and localization platform for GDPR/CCPA compliance with integrated billing available on AWS (Amazon) and OCI (Oracle) cloud marketplaces.
- 0Box: a Dropbox-like consumer-oriented personal cloud dAapp built on top of 0Chainnet. 0Box outperforms Dropbox with its high level of performance, availability, reliability, built-in privacy, security, and control over data, with private sharing capabilities. To use 0Box, you don’t need any password or login information as it is completely secure and anonymous. 0Box is a showcase for a B2C type of apps that is possible to develop on 0ChainNet.
- 0Wallet: a $ZCN token native wallet with ultra-secure split-key 2DA technology. This provides serverless two-factor authentication with air gap feature where you don’t need a hardware key. This way you don’t need to rely on Google servers or other 3rd parties to be able to access your funds, and it prevents sim-swap attacks. 0Chain can license this technology to exchanges or other wallet providers. 0Wallet also provides features of locking $ZCN and accumulating interest as well as staking tokens (delegating) to 0Chain service providers (miners, sharders, blobbers).
A thing worth emphasizing is 0Chain’s technology is 100% agnostic to everything! Any blockchain or any traditional enterprise can easily integrate 0Chain products to leverage security, privacy, and compliance to their customers. On top of that, anyone can develop flexible data storage solutions according to their own needs on 0ChainNet. New data business models can be developed that will rival centralized competition without any possibility of de-platforming.
If you’re building a project you can partner with 0Chain to own your data and provide a single source of truth for your data! Email saswata@0chain.net
UBERIZING CLOUD STORAGE
0Chain’s low-cost hardware requirements enable wide distribution, scalability of the network, and progressive decentralization.
Most people can grasp the concept of Uber drivers. Well, 0Chain is “Uberizing” cloud storage. Imagine instead of owning a car and offering rides to customers, you own servers and hard drives in an infrastructure sufficient environment (ideally in a data center). Coupled with staking $ZCN this allows you to earn passive income by providing data storage through the 0Chain network.
With a higher earnings potential, lower investment, and almost 0-time spent, compared to uber drivers not a bad deal at all! Feel free to join the DataUber.net mailing list and receive the latest updates on how to join the data revolution.
CONCLUSION
It’s really quite simple. If we want to achieve the promise of a fair data economy where consumers and enterprises own their data without the need for centralized intermediaries, the data needs to be byzantine fault-tolerant! The data storage layer sits right at the foundation of that. Everything 0Chain is building is for future needs! They are ahead of the curve. They are skating to where the puck is going to be. 0Chain is a game-changer in the cloud storage space, and you can screenshot that!
Stay tuned for part 3 of the series where we’re going to take a look at the very interesting $ZCN token economics, discuss why $ZCN is an asset with non-speculative value and think about the potential in terms of adoption, and future ZCN token price potential.
In the meantime, if you want to learn more about 0Chain, I STRONGLY recommend you to watch Ask Feebs (director of operations for 0Chain) YouTube episodes where he gives a high-end breakdown of 0Chain blockchain, storage, and ZCN supply in a very simple, easy to digest manner.
AskFeebs — 0Chain storage & blockchain video
AskFeebs — 0Chain ZCN supply explained
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I would like to thank 0Chain ambassadors, Siam, Sculptex, Chad, and Tiago for all the help on this article!
