Decentralized Storage Project Analysis: Comparison of MEMO with Filecoin and Arweave

Author: OxCarna

As Web 3.0 arrives, the decentralized transformation guided by blockchain technology is having a profound impact. In this transformation, data is not only an important production factor that facilitates the operation of the socio-economic system but has also become an asset with value circulation and inheritance, and its storage methods are receiving unprecedented attention.

Cutting-edge decentralized applications such as NFTs and the metaverse place decentralized storage at a crucial support point. This article analyzes the similarities and differences between the decentralized storage projects MEMO, Filecoin, and Arweave from three aspects: storage technology, system governance foundation, and scalability.

1. About Permanent Storage

Throughout human history, many records of civilizations have been accidentally or intentionally destroyed. As technology enters a new era, humanity continues to attempt to unlock permanent storage based on the expectation of the continuity of civilization.

In 2019, GitHub launched a code permanence preservation plan, aiming to preserve data for at least a thousand years. GitHub has set up a method of preservation that involves storing multiple copies across various data formats and locations without interruption, even preserving data in film format 250 meters deep in the permafrost of the Arctic to mitigate the risk of data loss in the future.

Compared to GitHub's millennium storage plan, decentralized storage attempts to transcend this complex storage method that spans multiple organizations and formats, instead achieving it through blockchain and a series of technological mechanisms.

As pioneers of decentralized storage, the visions of Filecoin, Arweave, and MEMO are all related to permanent storage. Filecoin's vision is "to store important information for humanity," Arweave proposes the vision of reviving the Library of Alexandria, while MEMO aims to "ensure the eternal existence of human information data."

Among these three, Arweave appears to align most closely with the concept of permanent storage, as it stores data directly "on-chain" and adopts a one-time payment model for long-term storage, while Filecoin and MEMO use a phased payment model based on storage duration and required space. However, Arweave is a completely open network, accessible to anyone but immutable, making this model suitable only for storing public data and not for private data, and it poses the risk of low-value data occupying storage resources for extended periods.

Since the transmission of information is a process of natural selection, low-value data will gradually disappear over time, while high-value data will continue to be inherited across cycles. The hope of achieving permanent data preservation through a one-time solution may overestimate the value of that data, and measuring permanence by a person's century-long life seems overly vague.

From the perspective of data stratification, important data such as technology, history, and culture that impact human civilization require permanent storage, but transient data from the Internet of Things and smart driving, while crucial for the current socio-economic operation, do not need to be preserved long-term. Therefore, while permanent storage is a grand vision, not all data is worth permanent storage.

The best understanding of permanent storage is to ensure the security and reliability of the data stored at present, as permanence is composed of every present moment. Only when the current data's security and reliability are guaranteed can permanent storage become a possibility. Thus, the most reasonable organization of storage is still phased payment, allowing society and time to choose which data is worth passing down forever.

The security and reliability of data require the high cooperation of multiple complex technologies existing simultaneously. In the less than ten years since the birth of decentralized storage, there is currently no way to judge it by the standard of time, but we can attempt to measure it from the aspects of storage technology, system governance foundation, and scalability.

2. Storage Technology

When discussing decentralized storage, most people tend to focus more on blockchain than on storage itself.

Blockchain is an emerging technology that has been around for less than 20 years, and its decentralized and immutable characteristics have led people to expect it to change the world. In contrast, storage technology has been used for thousands of years to record and transmit information; compared to the grand vision of blockchain changing the world, storage is a low-key yet long-standing existence.

Although storage applications are more fundamental, it does not mean that it is an easy technology to implement. On the contrary, it is a typical technology-intensive and capital-intensive industry. We see that the traditional cloud storage market has been monopolized by a few global internet giants such as Amazon, Google, and Baidu, as the formidable barriers erected by technology and capital make it difficult for small companies to compete.

When storage collides with blockchain, decentralized storage is born. For Filecoin, Arweave, and MEMO, decentralization is merely a prefix added to their names; their essence remains that of storage projects, and storage technology cannot be overlooked when comparing them.

Storage technology has evolved over thousands of years into digital storage in recent decades. The performance of traditional cloud storage, led by Amazon Cloud, is already sufficiently high, but the privacy issues arising from centralized operation models and service interruptions caused by server failures are often criticized. If the advanced technologies of traditional cloud storage providers are combined with blockchain, it would upgrade into a highly advanced technology.

However, most decentralized storage projects currently use relatively primitive storage technologies. For instance, regarding redundancy mechanisms, both Filecoin and Arweave employ primitive multi-copy redundancy, while MEMO uses a combination of erasure coding and multi-copy redundancy.

Multi-copy is a primitive redundancy strategy that has existed since the inception of computer storage, where each piece of data is completely backed up at corresponding nodes. For early small-scale data, using multi-copy technology could meet the needs. However, as subsequent data volumes surged, continuing to use multi-copy technology posed a significant challenge to storage space, leading to the invention of erasure coding technology, which is now used by cloud storage giants to solve large-capacity data storage issues.

Erasure coding involves splitting data into small chunks, adding a certain amount of redundancy check codes, and then storing them across different nodes. Compared to multi-copy technology, erasure coding significantly contributes to reducing storage overhead. For example, a 1GB data file using a 5-copy redundancy model can tolerate the loss of up to 4 nodes, requiring a storage overhead of 5GB. In contrast, using a 5+5 erasure coding model can also tolerate the loss of up to 5 nodes, but the required storage overhead is only 2GB. Thus, while both models provide 5-fold redundancy, the storage overhead of the 5+5 erasure coding model is only 40% of that of the 5-copy model.

With its dual redundancy mechanism, MEMO not only significantly improves storage space utilization but also gives users more autonomy in their choices. For data with low access frequency, the default erasure coding mode can be used, while for data with high access frequency, the multi-copy mode can be selected. In addition to the redundancy mechanism, MEMO has also developed a data repair function, utilizing RAFI technology to quickly identify failed data blocks, thereby improving data repair efficiency several times over.

Therefore, in terms of redundancy mechanisms, both Filecoin and Arweave represent a combination of primitive storage technology and blockchain, while MEMO combines cutting-edge storage technology with blockchain.

3. System Governance Foundation

The operational rules of a system play a crucial role in its stability and longevity. There are significant differences in the system governance foundations of Filecoin, Arweave, and MEMO.

From an economic model perspective, both Filecoin and Arweave incentivize storage through block production. Their user roles consist of two types: storage users and miners. Although Filecoin also has a retrieval miner role, retrieval miners and storage miners can serve both roles, meaning that Filecoin essentially has only two types of roles.

In terms of operational principles, Filecoin, as the incentive layer for IPFS, uses proof of replication and proof of spacetime as its consensus basis. Its operational model is block encapsulation, meaning only miners who successfully encapsulate data are eligible to obtain block production rights, and its data storage success rate is highly correlated with encapsulation success. Arweave, as a blockchain-like structure, uses "proof of access" and PoW consensus as its incentive basis. Its difference from traditional blockchains lies in the fact that not every node needs to synchronize all on-chain data; miners only need to download a portion of the blocks to begin verification immediately.

MEMO does not incentivize storage through block production but instead designs three interrelated and mutually constrained roles to maintain ecological balance within the system, utilizing smart contracts for system autonomy. In addition to storage users (User) and storage providers (Provider), MEMO has also designed an intermediary manager (Keeper) role. The primary function of the Keeper is to challenge storage nodes (Provider) and verify whether they are storing data as agreed, playing a crucial role in the stable operation of the system.

Unlike Filecoin, the three roles in MEMO are independent and cannot serve multiple roles simultaneously. Users are consumers, Providers calculate earnings based on the size and duration of the storage space provided, and Keepers receive a certain percentage of management earnings from User payments, with transactions between roles automatically executed through smart contracts.

If the two roles of Filecoin and Arweave form a straight line, then the three roles of MEMO create a triangle. Geometry suggests that a triangle is the most stable structure, and MEMO achieves a stable operation through the design of three independent roles, establishing a tripod effect.

To ensure data integrity, MEMO has developed a public verification mechanism, with the Keeper role playing an important management and supervisory function within this mechanism. Every node that gains economic benefits must accept supervision; for example, each Provider must accept challenges from Keepers, and each Keeper must also accept challenges from other Keepers, creating a tightly interlinked system. To prevent collusion attacks between roles, this public verification mechanism allows any third party to participate in verification, ensuring the openness, unpredictability, and randomness of the verification process.

Additionally, MEMO has designed a user rating system, allowing Users to evaluate Providers and Keepers they have collaborated with. Roles with high integrity will receive more service opportunities in the future. This rating system, along with the design of the Keeper role and the deployment of smart contracts, collectively forms the governance foundation of the MEMO system, ensuring its stable and healthy operation.

• Scalability

Currently, a large amount of data is stored on hard drives with lifespans of several decades, making the realization of long-term storage a supreme test of scalability. To assess scalability, we can analyze several aspects such as the degree of decentralization, participation threshold, reliability, availability, and energy consumption.

Among the three projects, both Filecoin and Arweave incentivize storage through block production, but the competition for computing power leads to a relatively high participation threshold for both.

Filecoin relies on block encapsulation, which is a complex coding and computing process, meaning that only high-performance, powerful professional equipment is suitable for participation, while ordinary devices, due to limited computing power, find it difficult to engage, leading Filecoin to inevitably trend towards centralization.

Arweave adopts a blockchain-like structure called Blockweave. Although it stores data "on-chain," it does not back up data across the entire network like traditional blockchains. Instead, it incentivizes storage through miners accessing random recall blocks. While this encourages miners to store as many historical blocks and "rare" blocks as possible, the lack of full network backup inevitably reduces the degree of decentralization.

In contrast, MEMO guarantees complete decentralization through a new design concept and a model that does not rely on computing power competition. In its architectural design, MEMO optimizes and innovates upon traditional blockchain storage architecture, recording only role and transaction information on the blockchain while storing a vast amount of data on edge storage devices in a shared economy model. This approach not only ensures complete decentralization but also significantly lowers the participation threshold.

Moreover, in the new global landscape, carbon emissions will undoubtedly become one of the important value standards for decentralized storage. The encapsulation process of Filecoin and the PoW consensus process of Arweave are both high-energy consumption processes. Although Filecoin stores data off-chain, the verification process still occurs on-chain, while Arweave places both storage and verification on-chain. In contrast, MEMO designs its public verification mechanism to operate off-chain through random verification functions, allowing MEMO to achieve low energy consumption and high availability without sacrificing security.

The low participation threshold allows MEMO to achieve breadth in scalability, while complete decentralization, low energy consumption, and high availability provide depth. In terms of reliability, MEMO also leads the way in decentralized storage with its advanced storage technology. MEMO achieves the promise of data integrity in every present moment through multiple innovations and unique technologies.

The birth of blockchain has prompted the separation of computation and storage, and the deployment of smart contracts along with the design of the Keeper role has separated incentives from block production. These separations are the essence of the MEMO concept, making it a representative of fully decentralized, low-redundancy, low-energy consumption, high reliability, and high availability distributed cloud storage.