Decentralized Storage backed by Restaked Ethereum

We've spent the last few blog posts (here and here) discussing the interoperability and structure of subjective data to make it useful onchain but we have not discussed the actual offchain storage network, the value generator of the network.

When choosing to store data we went with IPFS to handle content addressing, or in other words, to uniquely identify files uploaded to the network. Since it's inception, IPFS has spawned an entire stack for storing, discovering and hosting data. Further, the IPFS developers created Filecoin to provide a programmable way for users to pay nodes, or miners, to store their information for a defined amount of time. Our design is not unlike this idea but instead of being secured by a native token, we are securing our network via restaked ethereum. Furthermore, we optimized our storage solution to cater to quickly finalize the storage of smaller amounts of data/websites. This allows us to slowly scale payments to the network, abstracting out the complexity from the end user. Operators are tasked with storing and keeping this data alive throughout a defined period of time. Slashing penalties occur if this requirement is not met.

In the spirit of IPFS, we envision operators using Filecoin to scale efficiently while still abstracting payment complexity from the end user

Decentralized Pinning

This design can be thought of as a decentralized pinning service secured by restaked Ethereum, which we hope will tackle some of the trust and verification issues brought up by the IPFS team in their article The State of Dapps on IPFS: Trust vs. Verification. Chiefly, that if we incentivize a network of nodes to pin files, we can help to remove trust in a central pinning service to actually generate and pin the correct CID data.

If you upload the raw files to a pinning service, you are trusting the pinning service to generate the CID for the input data. ~ Trust vs. Verification in dApps

Use Cases

This decentralized pinning service feature enables us to offer storage solutions to our subjective data design, websites wishing to host their frontends, companies wishing to store large amounts of data, and any other storage needs all backed by Restaked Ethereum.

~ Sam (glu)

If this is interesting to you, please reach out me on X (twitter), and let me know what you think, or follow Align Network to stay up to date on this design.