Damus has sparked a trend; why do we need decentralized cloud storage?

On February 1, 2023, the decentralized social application Damus, based on the decentralized protocol Nostr, officially launched. This event stirred significant interest, and within just one day, practitioners and users in the Web3 industry began sharing their Damus addresses. Moreover, many mainstream users also followed and learned about Damus on Twitter. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, praised Damus's debut on the Apple App Store in a tweet on the evening of February 1, calling it a "milestone for open protocols." This tweet garnered millions of views in less than a day.

What significant implications does the protocol Nostr have that allows it to emerge as a milestone decentralized application? Nostr is an open protocol designed to create a decentralized global social network. Media commentators outside of China have described Nostr as the next alternative to Twitter. Last year, Jack Dorsey donated approximately 14 BTC (worth $245,000 at the time) to fund the development of Nostr.

Damus has two slogans: "A social network you control" and "Peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted messaging," reflecting characteristics of decentralization such as user sovereignty and encrypted privacy. In recent years, the emergence and discovery of decentralized social platforms and media platforms, as well as centralized social giants' exploration and attempts towards decentralization, all prove that the decentralization of social interactions has become an inevitable trend. The existing issues of privacy leaks and data sovereignty caused by the centralized recording, storage, and control of user data in mainstream applications are also pain points that urgently need to be addressed by decentralized technologies.

Based on this, CESS, as the first decentralized cloud storage network focused on enterprise-level commercial applications, can provide one of the most important technologies behind social "decentralization"—decentralized cloud storage.

Common Storage Types in SocialFi

Before understanding how CESS supports SocialFi through decentralized storage, let's take a look at the three common storage types used in SocialFi applications within the industry.

- On-chain Storage

On-chain storage refers to data being stored on the blockchain. "On-chain" means that the data has been fully executed and achieves "distributed transactional integrity." It also implies "consensus" and "storage," where transactions/data are accepted by all participants on the chain, ensuring consistency and correctness; the consensus data is stored by multiple parties, meaning the data will not be lost or unilaterally tampered with.

The current issues with on-chain storage are also quite evident: from a user experience perspective, high costs, slow speeds, and network congestion can all become significant drawbacks affecting user experience at the application level; from the perspective of storage and computing costs, on-chain storage is also not the best choice to support the data storage needs of large-scale applications. Similarly, for social applications dealing with massive amounts of user data and behavioral data, on-chain storage faces the same issues.

- Centralized Cloud Storage

Centralized cloud storage, as a Web2 storage method, is familiar to everyone, referring to storing data on centralized cloud servers. Traditional centralized cloud storage is a solution that places storage resources in the cloud for access, often provided as a service by providers to enterprises in need. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google abroad, and Alibaba domestically represent the leading enterprises in centralized cloud storage.

Centralized cloud storage is impeccable in performance, but centralized data management brings new risks to users, including censorship, privacy violations, data theft, and poor information integrity. The core issue is that centralized control over data is contrary to the birth of SocialFi; the idea and goal of returning data sovereignty to users have not been truly realized.

- Decentralized Cloud Storage

Decentralized cloud storage is a solution that balances decentralization and cloud storage. Based on blockchain technology, decentralized cloud storage addresses the issues of centralized data storage, providing an efficient, robust, scalable, secure, and cost-effective way to store information.

Decentralized storage systems offer higher reliability when distributing and storing data. By protecting copies of files, they prevent losses caused by hardware failures; compared to centralized cloud storage, decentralized cloud storage helps save hardware and software costs while ensuring efficiency. Additionally, the use of peer-to-peer technology eliminates the need for unnecessary resources.

Decentralized cloud storage, built on blockchain technology, not only provides higher efficiency but also allows users and hosts to easily access data without needing to access servers. Techniques such as sharding split and encrypt data, ensuring its security and privacy.

CESS: Born for Decentralized Cloud Storage

CESS focuses on decentralized cloud storage and is the first storage network to provide a decentralized full-stack solution for high-frequency dynamic data storage in Web3. CESS aims to build the first decentralized cloud storage network that can support large-scale commercial applications, providing enterprises and individuals with the fastest, lowest-cost, secure, reliable, programmable, and private decentralized cloud storage services.

CESS can also provide decentralized object storage services and development tools for various enterprise-level dApps; it offers infrastructure for individual users (especially creators) regarding data rights confirmation, privacy protection, data monetization, and free circulation.

From the perspective of CESS supporting SocialFi, there are several obvious advantages:

- Public Chain Ecosystem

CESS is also an open-source public chain, and its distributed capabilities and consensus mechanism provide a more secure and stable storage foundation. CESS promotes developers to deploy applications by providing APIs and SDKs, compatible with WASM/EVM contracts, facilitating the construction of a favorable public chain ecosystem for developers. For SocialFi development teams, CESS offers them a better ecological environment and application potential.

- Technological Innovation

CESS's unique random selection rotating consensus node mechanism (R²S) can coordinate network resources and network load, and it can ensure data security and integrity through proprietary technologies that protect data ownership, multi-replica recoverable storage proof mechanisms (PoDR²), multi-type data rights confirmation (MDRC), and decentralized proxy re-encryption.

In addition, CESS's object storage service (DeOSS) technically advances towards the vision of large-scale commercial cloud. DeOSS is a decentralized object-based massive storage service, a tool for storing and retrieving unstructured data and metadata objects using HTTP APIs. It provides decentralized storage services that are fast in read/write, highly secure, scalable, and privacy-managed, specifically designed for users with high-frequency dynamic data storage needs. For social projects that rely heavily on real-time, high-frequency sharing and updating of information and data, DeOSS presents high availability and adaptability in decentralized social applications.

- Diverse Applications

Moreover, CESS's existing technical capabilities can support massive commercial data storage needs, especially for SocialFi, where a large amount of user data can be stored in a decentralized manner on CESS. CESS supports not only applications in the SocialFi space but also use cases in the metaverse, NFTs, streaming platforms, and nearly all Web2 and Web3 data storage.

Conclusion

Looking back at the history of storage development, humanity has reached a ceiling in storing data on physical hardware; cloud storage has eliminated the need to manage storage infrastructure and has achieved significant accomplishments. Decentralized storage, however, "stands on the shoulders of giants," solving existing problems and bringing an infinite future for cloud storage. CESS not only supports the infrastructure construction for decentralized social storage but will also continuously contribute to decentralized cloud storage, user data sovereignty, and data monetization.