CESS test network is online! The first decentralized storage network offering diverse application scenarios

Author: OneBlock

Frequent harassment calls, inexplicable scam messages… Privacy leakage issues are everywhere in daily life. Who leaked personal privacy?

With the development of the internet, cybersecurity and privacy protection have become increasingly important to people. The main reason for the leakage of personal information online is the centralized data storage method, which exposes stored data to significant risks of information leakage or hacker attacks. Therefore, decentralized storage has emerged, based on blockchain technology, aiming to ensure network security and user privacy, meet the development needs of blockchain infrastructure, and gradually stand at the forefront of Web3 development.

Among many decentralized storage solutions, CESS, developed based on the Substrate open-source framework, is a high-speed, secure, and scalable decentralized cloud storage network, aiming to become the first decentralized cloud data storage network for enterprise-level commercial applications, and is currently one of the few storage networks that can support large-scale, high-frequency commercial applications.

According to the CESS RoadMap, CESS launched the v0.1 testnet in 2021 and will migrate storage to the mainnet this year. In July, the CESS testnet went live. What kind of decentralized storage experience will it bring to users and developers? How does CESS stand out among numerous decentralized storage solutions? Let's delve into the decentralized storage world brought by CESS.

CESS Milestone ------ Testnet Launch

In July this year, CESS welcomed a historic moment: the testnet launch! The CESS testnet will be rolled out in phases. On July 5, the CESS testnet v0.4.2 officially went live, achieving great success. On July 15, CESS launched the iterative testnet v0.4.4, testing storage miners, consensus miners, EVM, and gateways. The testing period for this version is approximately 2 weeks. CESS - v0.4.4

Highlights

• Supports EVM.

• Instant file transfer functionality.

• Batch submission of proofs and verification results functionality.

• Users can freely download files on the chain.

Optimizations

• Optimized the client file upload process, fixed occasional file upload failures, and allowed users to misreport file sizes.

• Optimized the client file download process, improving file download speed and user experience.

• Adjusted the access method for public and private data.

• Adjusted the network connection method for consensus nodes. Before the adjustment, the scheduler connected to the network through the RPC nodes provided by CESS; after the adjustment, each node connects to the CESS network via local RPC to enhance network performance.

New Features

• After the introduction of the WASM contract virtual machine, CESS officially deployed the EVM module, supporting seamless integration of contracts in the Ethereum ecosystem.

The CESS testnet consists of three parts: CESS-Bucket, CESS-Consensus Node, and CESS-Gateway. During this period, the testnet is open to users, allowing anyone to build storage nodes and consensus nodes on the CESS testnet and experience the Web3 decentralized storage process. CESS Testnet Launch Event

This testnet involves storage miners, consensus miners, and storage users, allowing users to test all modules and experience the security, efficiency, and operation of CESS decentralized cloud storage. By joining the CESS testnet as a storage node or consensus node, or as a user to experience file upload and download operations in decentralized storage, CESS offers generous rewards for qualifying interactions. The specific details are as follows:

• Storage Miners

If the "total storage" indicates that the average storage space is greater than 500M/day at the end of the current testing period, storage miners will receive 0.5 points daily.

• Consensus Miners

Successfully operating as a consensus miner and becoming a validator or candidate node (waiting status) will earn 1 point daily.

After the CESS mainnet goes live, rewards will be distributed at a ratio of 1:100 (i.e., 1 point can be exchanged for 100 CESS Tokens). The official will publish the miner reward list daily, and the event rules will be adjusted in real-time based on the testnet's operation. Please stay tuned for official notifications.

Next, CESS will continue to improve and iterate the network through the testnet, adding various functional tests and network stress tests to ensure a smooth launch of the mainnet.

*The final interpretation of the event is reserved by CESS

CESS Decentralized Storage World

The Pillar of Blockchain Technology ------ Decentralized Storage

Computing, storage, and networking are the three pillars of blockchain technology, with storage as the second pillar playing a crucial role in the development of the Web3 world. On one hand, with the growth of the Web3 world, the demand for data storage is exploding, while blockchain itself is not designed for storing large amounts of data. Storing data in blocks is very expensive and can lead to network congestion and a series of other issues. The massive demand for data storage makes decentralized storage have enormous commercial prospects, and its importance is increasingly highlighted.

On the other hand, many NFTs' underlying metadata and DApp front-end data are currently stored off-chain, where data stored on centralized networks faces numerous risks. As the saying goes, "Not your private key, not your cryptocurrency," the issues of data security and data sovereignty urgently need to be addressed. Decentralized storage, based on blockchain distributed storage technology, returns private data to individuals, allowing users to truly own their data, providing high privacy, strong security, customization, and economic incentive models, meeting current development needs.

The development of Web3 cannot be separated from the support of storage, and decentralized storage is the trend of the times. Currently, there are attempts at blockchain storage networks such as Filecoin, Siacoin, and Arweave, but they only provide storage services that connect users and storage providers, failing to achieve comprehensive utilization of information between blockchain networks, and have not fully unleashed the development potential of decentralized storage. Providing a complete data cloud storage technology solution for the Web3 era and filling the gap in decentralized cloud storage network infrastructure is precisely the vision of the decentralized storage solution CESS. Decentralized Cloud Storage CESS

CESS is committed to providing a global decentralized cloud data storage network for the Web3 era. Based on cutting-edge cloud computing, blockchain, and data encryption technologies, we have analyzed CESS's data sharing protocol, multi-replica recoverable storage proof (PoDR²), and multi-type data rights confirmation mechanism (MDRC) in detail from a technical perspective in the article “CESS: The Future of Decentralized Data Storage in the Polkadot Ecosystem”, providing customers with secure, high-performance, and unlimited cloud data storage services.

Overview of Storage Technology Advantages

• Randomly Selected Rotating Consensus Node (R²S) Mechanism: Anyone has an anonymous and fair opportunity to join the CESS network as a candidate consensus miner, thus avoiding manipulation by giant nodes and providing equal opportunities for all miners. This achieves low Gas fees, fast transaction processing throughput, and consensus security.

• Multi-Replica Recoverable Storage Proof (PoDR²) Mechanism: Ensures data security, availability, and integrity in distributed scenarios, addressing current storage systems' data leakage and loss issues.

• Multi-Type Data Rights Confirmation (MDRC) Mechanism: Achieves rights confirmation for different forms of multi-dimensional data on a distributed network, solving the difficulties of data certification and rights confirmation during data circulation.

• Decentralized Proxy Re-Encryption Mechanism: Allows data owners to freely interact with each other without disclosing data content under decentralized conditions.

• Smart Cloud Space Management: The CESS network pools global node space, forming a "decentralized cloud storage pool," providing users with on-demand cloud storage service models. CESS sets up scheduling services in network space to intelligently allocate storage users' data to global nodes, maximizing and effectively utilizing storage space ------ Smart cloud space management coordinates and schedules resources and loads across the entire network, achieving high availability and high efficiency.

Interested developers can further read CESS's official technical articles:

CESS Mechanism Explained (1): Multi-Layer Network Architecture Design

CESS Mechanism Explained (2): Blockchain Layer and Randomly Selected Rotating (R²S) Consensus Node Mechanism

CESS Mechanism Explained (3): Storage, Content Distribution Network, and Multi-Replica Recoverable Storage Proof

CESS Mechanism Explained (4): Application Layer

Diverse Storage Application Scenarios

From a technical perspective, current storage proofs like FIL cannot support high-capacity, multi-node data storage. Their replication proof technology is overly complex and requires too much computation, consuming a lot of energy, reducing efficiency, and having time assumptions in the space-time proof cycle. Even if each computer's processing power is different, the cycle is fixed, leading to a lack of flexibility in verification. In summary, the enormous computational load cannot support enterprises' flexible and free data storage needs.

Compared to other decentralized cloud storage solutions, CESS, based on Substrate, provides decentralized cloud storage technology that supports high-capacity and high-availability enterprise-level commercial storage applications. Multi-replica storage enhances data availability and reliability, fundamentally preventing common data attacks and overcoming issues like data compatibility and long decryption times. Additionally, compared to traditional network hard drive service providers, CESS network services have significant advantages in security, ownership protection, cost, and capacity.

From the underlying construction to the application layer, CESS reflects a high degree of friendliness towards commercial applications, providing APIs that meet any application involving data storage, supporting NFT, GameFi, DeFi, and being compatible with Web2. Application scenarios include but are not limited to:

• Distributed Cloud Network Disk: Better meets the needs of Web3 network infrastructure development, providing enterprise-level storage market services.

• Online Data Sharing Platform: Any application, including text, images, audio, and video data, can be published on the CESS network, allowing developers, creators, and consumers to participate in the construction and experience of the ecosystem.

• Data Analysis Applications: CESS can provide a decentralized cloud storage online data sharing platform, as well as data analysis, data protection, and other services.

CESS can meet the data storage and sharing needs of individuals and small businesses, while also supporting the storage needs of large enterprises with high security and high performance, satisfying the diverse needs of individuals, enterprises, and organizations.

The Present and Future of CESS

Web3 aims to integrate global computing power, data, and networks into a highly secure distributed system. From the historical mainframe to Web2 and then to blockchain, Web3 is the most complex technological endeavor ever. It will not only make our existing applications more efficient and secure but will also bring a set of entirely new applications that we have never imagined. CESS is the storage system for Web3, ensuring that all of this becomes possible.

------ In July 2022, CESS Chairman Nicholas Zaldastani spoke at IVS Crypto 2022

CESS, as a unique decentralized cloud storage project that can support large-scale, high-frequency commercial applications, can support more commercial applications compared to other storage projects. Currently popular sectors such as NFTs, GameFi, and the metaverse can all adopt CESS storage as support, possessing greater development potential and commercial value.

With the launch of the CESS testnet, the vision of building a new type of decentralized cloud storage platform with transparent rules, data security, and energy efficiency is gradually advancing, which will become the infrastructure for decentralized distributed cloud storage data networks in the next generation of the Web3 era, promoting better and faster development of the Web3 era.

References:

CESS testnet is officially launching!

https://medium.com/@CESS_LAB/cess-testnet-is-officially-launching-34a078836e97

The CESS Testnet v0.4.4 is being released on July 15th.

https://medium.com/@CESS_LAB/the-cess-testnet-v0-4-4-is-being-released-on-july-15th-a2d0ee96f3e0

CESS Testnet v0.4.0 Summary Report

https://medium.com/@CESS_LAB/cess-testnet-v0-4-0-summary-report-c9b46c3d0add

Release for cess-testnet-v0.4.4

https://github.com/CESSProject/cess/releases/tag/v0.4.4

From Fringe Tech to Mainstream Adoption: CESS Discusses the Rise, Current Opportunities, and the Future of Web3 at IVS Crypto 2022

https://cryptobreaking.com/from-fringe-tech-to-mainstream-adoption-cess-discusses-the-rise-current-opportunities-and-the-future-of-web3-at-ivs-crypto-2022/