[AMA Recap] Filecoin takes the lead. Crust, the Polkadot ecological decentralized storage project, is on the rise!

BitMart, a premier global digital asset trading platform, recently announced the listing of Crust (token symbol: CRU). Designed to build a decentralized cloud ecosystem that values data privacy and ownership, Crust breaks new ground by solving long-lasting problems for centralized cloud computing and storage platforms, such as service instability, high network bandwidth cost, and limited data transmission capacity.

On October 16 2020, we held a Telegram AMA with the topic of “Filecoin takes the lead. Crust, the Polkadot ecological decentralized storage project, is on the rise!” to better help BitMart users know more about Crust Network and its team. We are pleased to have Dean Yan, Product Lead of Crust Network at our Ask Me Anything session and share valuable insights with our community members.

If you missed the AMA live, check our AMA recap below for more details:

[GUEST INTRODUCTION]

Dean Yan is the product lead of Crust Network. His background was mainly in the IT industry and information security. He has been working in Cisco on supply chain blockchain-based projects, one of his innovation projects was announced at the global Develop@Cisco conference.

[AMA]

BitMart Admin:

Q1: Can you briefly tell us what is Crust Network in 3-5 sentences?

Dean:

Crust provides a decentralized storage network for the Web3 ecosystem. It supports multiple storage layer protocols such as IPFS. It leverages TEE tech for storage work validation, and Polkadot’s Substrate tech framework for chains. It aims to build a decentralized cloud ecosystem that values data privacy and ownership.

BitMart Admin:

Q2: Crust uses a double consensus of Meaningful Proof of Work and Guaranteed Proof of Stake. What are the individual usefulness of these 2 algorithms？ How can I run a node or validator for Crust?

Dean:

So it's actually not a double consensus. MPoW is off-chain, it uses work inspectors running in TEE to inspect storage work and generate work reports within TEE, and then upload the report to the chain. So to be accurate, MPoW is actually not the 'consensus'. So on top of MPoW work reports, we build our GPoS consensus, derived from Polkadot's NPoS to generate blocks and distribute block rewards based on MPoW work reports. In order to run a node, you can go to our website and find the TestNet → Join TestNet, there's a full guide to do that.

BitMart Admin:

Q3: What are your plans in place for global expansion, are Crust focusing on the only market at this time? Or focus on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships? Can you explain this?

Dean:

Crust mainly has 2 markets to target.

Crust Cloud is our version of Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive. An app that users can easily upload and download files to our decentralized cloud platform. Crust Cloud is currently in the early stages of testing, and users can check it out already.

Crust also offers file storage services for DApps and businesses. We see this as a huge market, as more DApps are being built and many of them have large requirements for data. The best option for these businesses is to be on a decentralized platform where their data is secure, and can easily, quickly, and cheaply accessed (compared to using something like AWS). We are speaking with a few businesses and DApps already, and hope we can have more announcements soon, closer to when the mainnet launches.

BitMart Admin:

Q4: Are you a global project or a local project? Can anybody anywhere use your project without any restrictions?

Dean:

We are a global project. We plan to have "miners" (people and businesses that provide storage services) around the world, much like how bitcoin miners are based globally. Having service providers worldwide means that users worldwide will have faster access to files, which is one of our key features.

Anyone with an internet connection and files that need storage can use our services through the Crust Cloud service. This is a program like iCloud or Dropbox for easy storage and retrieval of files.

BitMart Admin:

Q5: CRUST is not the first decentralized storage network I have heard of, there are others, like RiveX, that work really well. Which unsolved problem of the crypto space is solved in the Crust network?

Dean:

Yeah, there are already several projects of this space out there. Crust's trying to build a decentralized network without relying on "super nodes" or trustable nodes, or things like that. The core problem it addresses is sort of similar to Filecoin targets: to prove that a node has really done its storage work without cheating or monitoring from external super nodes. It uses a different way (TEE) to make sure the mining servers are cheap and easy for miners to join; also to give better support on privacy protection; thirdly, it is closely integrated with Polkadot's ecosystem, so can be easily used by DApps as well.

BitMart Admin:

Q6: Could you tell us a little bit about your roadmap going forward, how do you plan on onboarding users and gaining more adoption for Crust Network?

Dean:

We are doing three things on both supply and requirements sides. So on the supply side, with the next version of TestNet(maxwell2.0) we are going to invite miners to join and provide their storage resources. It is an incentive, so we are expecting a wider range of miners to join. On the requirements side, we are building a cloud storage application called Crust Cloud. The very first test version based on testNet is going to be available soon within this month so that people can start experience and comment on it; also, we are compiling a solid SDK/Gateway for other clients (like traditional cloud clients, and DApp developers) to use. There are lots of requirements from DApps.

BitMart Admin:

Q7：Why did you choose to build on Polkadot, what's the competitive advantage over ETH?

Dean:

We chose between different platforms, ETH is definitely one of the options. There are two major reasons for us to choose Polkadot. First, Crust Network is a rather complicated network, we need a lot of stuff to be customizable, or programmable — Smart contract is not enough, but Polkadot's substrate tech framework and parachain mechanism can offer that; also, we expect lots of storage orders incoming, so TPS, state explosion and gas fee can be a real issue. Second, we got lot's of support from Polkadot systems, including Web3 Foundation and Parity technologies, on technical support, funding, and marketing.

BitMart Admin:

Q8: Can you list 1 or 3 killer features of #CrustNetwork that make it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?

Dean:

First, hardware requirements are pretty low which is easier to spread out from a mining point of view; Second, data sealing is rather fast (right now the benchmark is <60s for 32G data) so storage users get a better experience; Third, more privacy protection oriented - TEE enclave grant that benefits by storing any data encrypted; Lastly, closely integrated with Polkadot ecosystem - which means can be easily integrated with Web3 DApps, better governance, etc.

BitMart Admin:

Q9：How will Crust Network solve the scaling problem? And how will it overcome the threat of centralization? How easy is it to use Crust Network in an existing infrastructure?

Dean:

Our technical leader recently did a session in Parity & Friends, hosted by Parity Technologies. He made an in-depth intro on our usage of OCW (off chain worker) to improve the scalability, and avoid state explosion.

For the centralization problem — we got 2 benefits to avoid that: first, as I mentioned in previous posts, the hardware requirements are pretty low and sort of anti-ASIC, so resource-wise it can hardly be centralized; secondly, GPoS is designed to be like a balance between PoS and PoW, it's highly unlikely for somebody to dominate on both resources and tokens.

For the existing infrastructure adaptation — it is a very good question. Starting from recently, we are planning to create a detailed guide for miners, mostly from a topology point of view, on how to join our network with a bunch of machines, or with a full-equipped data center : )

[Free Q&A]