Recently, the global blockchain rating and consulting agency Daling Research published a deep analysis of the blockchain infrastructure, including an in-depth study of the decentralized storage project DxChain. Please refer to the following content.
Due to the iteration and explosive development of the blockchain industry, many predictions will come true. Blockchain technology shocks the traditional financial industry with the "code is law", is also eroding the foundation of the Internet world and infrastructure construction.
No matter big data or artificial intelligence is based on secure storage, value exploitation, and privacy protection. Especially in the era of data, the ability to handle and process data has become a race among major business giants.
Data storage is a key technology, not only is the infrastructure for information retention, but also is a core asset to build business models and specific products. According to the research report of international data company IDC, the total global data storage in 2016 is 16.1ZB (1ZB=1024 (3rd power) TB) and maintains a compound annual growth rate of 40%. The total amount of data is expected to increase to 163ZB (175 billion) by 2025.
Storage has become the core market for enterprise service competition
According to the "Public Cloud Market Forecast 2015-2026" report published by Wikibon, the global cloud storage market scale will maintain a compound growth rate of 20% from 2015 to 2026, and the revenue is expected to reach $493 billion in 2026. Among them, the annual compound growth rates of PaaS, SaaS and IaaS are all above 18%.
Technical giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are dominating the data market. In China, companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, 360, etc. provide storage services for billions of Internet users and enjoy huge profits, leading to high computing services prices.
The migration of Storage Method
From hardware storage to cloud storage, from centralized to decentralized storage, storage migration has been the subject of the past decade, and the trend is accelerating to decentralization.
Blockchain technology first time raised a thinking of cloud storage through technology and economic aspect that decentralized storage based on the blockchain should be cheaper, safer, faster, and more widely distributed than current cloud storage solutions.
In the rise of decentralized storage, we can see the well-known projects like IPFS and Filecoin, Sia, Storj, DxChain, Swarm, "the first landing application of decentralized storage" bitdisk and so on.
The competition of decentralized storage and enterprise services
We are paying close attention to the competition of distributed storage and the potential players, including the high attention projects IPFS and Filecoin and different competitors. Since it is hard to measure the true value of decentralized projects as that of centralized storage companies, we try to analyze the characteristics of Filecoin/DxChain/Sia from the perspectives of commonality, technical features and business models.
Decentralized storage project: Filecoin / DxChain / Sia
1. Commonality: Decentralization/storage cost is based on secondary market/business model is explorating
2. Technology Character:
1) Similar blockchain infrastructure of Filecoin and Bitdisk;
2) Sia is created based on Bitcoin network;
3) The technical architecture of DxChain is “Chains-on-chain” which includes the main chain, storage chain and computing chain.
To be more specific, Filecoin aims to build a data storage network with file storage, transfer and trade, however, it’s hard to realize and develop. The consensus algorithm of Sia is PoW which is unsuitable to apply to economical products.
DxChain is a storage public chain with complete functions of development, storage and computing. Compared with Ethereum, DxChain adds storage functions; compared with other storage public chain, DxChain will implement data computing function; compared with the development public chain, DxChain combines storage and computing functions. Additionally, the commercial applicability of DxChain is stronger. As a business or a developer of Dapp, DxChain eliminates the time and cost of searching for additional data storage and computing. Moreover, compatibility of Ethereum Virtual Machines and smart contracts, making the whole system more developer-friendly when developers deploying different types of applications to DxChain.
Lightning Network improves the storage speed, since:
1) Anyone can process the node verification, greatly improved the transaction performance;
2) Steady contracts are able to handle massive documents
As distributed storage systems are used to handle the storage and computing of massive files, high level algorithm is required. Every transaction stored on the chain will affect the chain performance detrimentally. Therefore, DxChain adopted the lightning network storage protocol which allows two parties to complete the transaction offline without affecting the chain.
DxChain is more focusing on the underlying architecture of the blockchain storage technology, the design of service performance is relatively complete for business-oriented and customer-oriented. At the same time, the storage infrastructure platform is also under construction, such as AWS-compatible APIs, private clouds, and so on.
In general, from the perspective of industry and technology development, if everything goes smoothly, DxChain would be a dark horse in the blockchain world.
We'll wait and see.
