Guest：Qi Zhou，EthStorage

Host：Jenny ，BinaryDAO

Compiled by: Ashley, Sarah, Binary DAO

Thank you very much for the invitation from BinaryDAO. Today I have the honor to discuss with you the EthStorage project, the infrastructure we built on Ethereum.

I have been active in the blockchain field of the Ethereum ecosystem for many years, often participating in some online and offline activities of the Ethereum community, and have also written some EIPs about Ethereum development and improvements. So I have been thinking about what the future Web3 infrastructure will look like, what improvements we should make to make Ethereum better, and how to make this industry better?

Last year, I spent a lot of time discussing Data Availability with members of the Ethereum Foundation and did a lot of research in this area. Fortunately, I received a Grant from them last year, mainly to do some data recovery and error correction work in Danksharding, which has now been basically completed.

And just two weeks ago, our EthStorage project also received a Grant from the ETH Foundation.

So what is EthStorage?

In short, it has two goals:

The first is to take advantage of Ethereum’s security attributes and the open ecosystem that Ethereum has established. With the subsequent Layer 2 expansion, we have seen many expansion strategies in different directions, including Optimistic Rollup and ZK Rollup, etc. They are all making expansion improvements to solve Ethereum’s computing, transaction, TPS and other performance issues, and gaining Ethereum’s security.

Another important goal is to use Ethereum's Rollup technology and Layer2 technology to reduce Ethereum's storage costs. If you are familiar with Ethereum's storage model, you will know that its storage cost is very expensive. By using EthStorage, we hope to reduce Ethereum's storage cost to one thousandth of the current level and increase the existing storage capacity to more than PB level.

So how do we achieve this goal?

More technical details may be needed here, but the Rollup we are working on is fundamentally different from other Ethereum Rollups. Other Rollups are all solving Ethereum's computing and transaction problems and expanding TPS performance, which is an expansion of the ETH computing layer, while EthStorage is an expansion of the ETH storage layer.

Our core requirement is how to prove in the Ethereum Layer 1 contract that our Layer 2 stores so many copies of data, and the number of copies can reach TB or hundreds of TB or PB level. Such a scale is very important. As for the current Rollup, the storage scale is still relatively low, including Arbitrum and Arbitrum Nova, which have relatively high storage overhead. Their storage scale is still at the TB level, which is still far from the PB level.

If we can prove on the Ethereum Layer 1 contract that the number of replica data stored on our Layer 2 can reach a very high level, then we can create more interesting applications based on this expansion plan.

So this is a design goal we want to achieve. Based on such an expansion plan, we can develop some interesting applications on Ethereum.

On the other hand, for Rollups that focus on the computing layer, if they need a long-term storage mechanism, EthStorage can not only serve as a decentralized long-term storage solution, but can also be highly integrated with Ethereum and all Ethereum ecosystems. Everyone can verify all stored data through smart contracts. This is a very direct application scenario.

In addition, we also found that in the design of static websites, some decentralized storage applications, such as Filecoin or Arweave, already exist. For example, Uniswap backs up its front-end hosting, but due to some constraints in the storage system design of IPFS, Filecoin and Arweave themselves, they can only process data for static websites. Once we need a very rich front-end for dynamic web pages that can be interacted with by multiple users, we will find that Filecoin or Arweave is difficult to fully support.

With the storage expansion and the computing expansion to be promoted later, if we merge the two resources together, we can run a large number of rich and dynamic applications of Web2 in the form of Web3. There is a huge application prospect here.

If it is NFT, the application will be smoother. In addition to pictures, videos and music can use EthStorage as the native storage on the ETH chain.

For users, there is no need to worry about the sudden loss of data storage or the server crashing. In this way, EthStorage can better support all current applications of Ethereum. In order to support these applications, we have also developed a Web3 access protocol.

The access protocol of Web3 is a proposal we defined in ERC-4804. What version is this protocol? You can think of it as a decentralized HTTP version, or a more flexible IPFS version. First of all, the Scheme is Web3, and its style is actually very similar to HTTP, but the way to locate resources is a smart contract, not a centralized server.

Why do we need to have such an access agreement?

A very important reason is that when we have a large amount of data stored in Ethereum and can be directly referenced by smart contracts, we need a decentralized way to access it, without relying on centralized or decentralised services such as MetaMask or Infura, and can directly access it through a link. For example, if I want to visit Vitailk's website, it is hosted on a smart contract, or if I want to visit a decentralized social network, it is also hosted on a smart contract, and all these content data are stored on EthStorage.

Finally, let me give you a more intuitive example. We are doing some early community experiments on EthStorage. For example, we uploaded Vitalik’s blog to a smart contract, and it cost about 0.13 Ethereum, which is about two or three hundred US dollars. In fact, the price is still quite expensive, but compared to the Ethereum mainnet, it is already very cheap. We implemented it on Arbitrum Nova, with a total of 40 megabytes of data. These websites can be accessed through our Gateway.

When you want to perform an access, Gateway accesses the Vitalikblog.eth contract, and finally finds the website on the corresponding contract on ENS. Therefore, this website is permanently hosted in the Arbitrum Nova network, including all the text, all sub-articles, and all pictures on it. They are parsed and returned by the smart contract. In the future, when the EthStorage mainnet is launched, the storage cost can be further reduced by 10 times or even 100 times.

We also have some projects at ETHDenver this time, including decentralized Github and Dropbox, as well as some special and crazy ideas in various aspects of decentralization that have begun to be built on us. These projects at ETHDevner will have the opportunity to demonstrate with our builders how to use EthStorage to build richer intelligent applications.

The above is a description of what we at EthStorage are doing from the perspective of the entire application layer. Thank you.