Summary

Decentralized cloud services have always been considered one of the most important applications of blockchain. Web3 + cloud services are not only a very good narrative direction, but also very easy to combine with AI narrative to further enhance the imagination space. DFINITY IC faces great technical challenges in achieving instant consensus for calculations in a purely asynchronous environment such as cloud services. Arweave AO breaks the shackles of blockchain and does not deal with the calculation itself and the consensus. Instead, it uses economic models and lazy verification to ensure the correctness of the calculation results. It can be said that it has taken a different approach.

basic introduction

The cloud is an IT environment that abstracts, aggregates, and shares scalable resources across the entire network. The resources here include computing, storage, network bandwidth, etc. Its main technical features include virtualization technology, distributed resource management technology, and parallel execution technology. Compared with traditional IT environments based on physical machines, the cloud has lower costs, better scalability, and is easier to manage.

Cloud services, cloud computing, and cloud storage are all sub-concepts derived from the concept of cloud. Cloud computing refers to the provision of computing services through the cloud, cloud storage refers to the provision of storage services through the cloud, and cloud services refer to the provision of various IT services through the cloud, which of course also includes computing services and storage services.

In particular, cloud computing and cloud services are often equated in many places, but this article still makes a distinction between them.

The current cloud service market is mainly monopolized by several cloud service giants. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure from abroad occupy more than 60% of the global cloud service market, while Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei Cloud from China also occupy about 60% of the domestic cloud service market. It can be said that the Matthew effect is obvious.

Decentralized cloud services are a subversion of the current cloud service model based on blockchain technology. They rely on market forces to determine the value and allocation of computing power, storage space, and bandwidth. This not only achieves more efficient and direct resource allocation, but more importantly, breaks the monopoly of cloud service giants.

Because all underlying resources are provided by users, once the economic structure of a decentralized cloud service network is no longer applicable, users can choose to exit the network or join other decentralized cloud service networks, which limits the space for decentralized cloud service network providers to "do evil."

The development path of decentralized cloud services

Decentralized computing is not mentioned here because the author believes that decentralized computing is a false proposition. First of all, the smart contract of the blockchain itself is responsible for decentralized computing. Secondly, for complex computing tasks, decentralization means a waste of computing power. There is no need to decentralize for the sake of decentralization. Verifiable distributed computing may be a better choice. The author will explain this later.

Compared with instantaneous computing, persistent storage is obviously an excellent application scenario for decentralization. It allows data to be stored and distributed in a decentralized network, and is tamper-proof and censorship-resistant. In fact, decentralized storage has become one of the most successful applications of blockchain in non-financial scenarios.

In 2014, Protocol Labs proposed IPFS, the full name of which is InterPlanetary File System, which means "interstellar file system". Just like its name, IPFS also opened the interstellar door to decentralized storage.

IPFS implements content-based file addressing. The same files will not be stored repeatedly, which greatly saves storage space. Based on the P2P network, data can be downloaded from multiple nodes concurrently, which greatly reduces bandwidth costs. It has become the underlying protocol for a number of decentralized storage projects, the most representative of which is Filecoin.

In July 2017, Protocol Labs, which developed IPFS, announced the establishment of the Filecoin project. Filecoin is an incentive application layer and blockchain public chain system on the IPFS network, which adopts a hybrid consensus mechanism: Expected Consensus (EC) is the main one, supplemented by Proof of Spacetime (PoSt) and Proof of Replication (PoRep).

Filecoin's vision is to incentivize a large number of nodes around the world to provide storage and retrieval services to users and promote the widespread use of the IPFS file storage and transfer protocol.

In July 2017, Stroj Labs founded Storj, almost at the same time as Filecoin. Storj focuses on enterprise-level storage services with a more commercial model, directly targeting AWS's S3 service, but its architecture is pseudo-decentralized.

Although it started issuing coins in 2018, its metadata management, block generation, rewards and penalties are all completed through satellite nodes, which are currently only maintained by the project party. Although the decentralization of satellite nodes is mentioned in future plans, it is currently difficult to do so, so the current situation is still traditional storage disguised as blockchain.

In June 2018, the Arweave mainnet was launched. Arweave is not based on the incentive layer of IPFS, but instead integrates data storage with incentives, focusing on achieving permanent storage and access to data.

Arweave does not require miners to save all block records. Instead, it encourages miners to save as many blocks as possible through Succinct Proof of Random Access (SPoRA), especially blocks with less redundancy, because miners who do so have a greater probability of receiving mining rewards. It can be said that Arweave ensures that data is copied as much as possible through game theory, thereby improving the reliability of data storage.

In May 2021, the Internet Computer (IC) mainnet developed by the DFINITY Foundation was launched. IC is the first complete decentralized cloud service and is known as the third-generation blockchain architecture.

IC uses innovative blockchain technology to provide unlimited scalability and high-speed transaction processing capabilities, and can process HTTP requests to support large-scale decentralized applications, from social media platforms, open source project hosting services to various enterprise-level applications, and even large AI models. In theory, any existing Internet service can be rebuilt into a decentralized version on IC.

In November 2022, the emergence of ChatGPT marked a milestone in strong artificial intelligence, triggering a new round of artificial intelligence craze, and emerging AI companies have sprung up like mushrooms after rain.

With the iteration and upgrade of large generative models, the demand and cost of computing power have increased exponentially, thus giving birth to the decentralized computing power track, which is committed to reducing the training costs of large models of emerging AI companies by sharing computing power and weakening the unfair competition behavior of cloud service giants using their dominant position.

Well-known projects in the decentralized computing power track include io.net, Render, Akash, Gensyn, etc. Although they can also be classified as decentralized cloud services, their core protocols are to build a computing power market and incentivize computing power providers, which is actually more in line with the definition of DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks).

In February 2024, Arweave officially launched the hyper-parallel computer AO, becoming the second complete decentralized cloud service after DFINITY's IC. The development of decentralized cloud services continues.

Arweave AO: Separation of Computation and Consensus

DFINITY IC and Arweave AO are both complete decentralized cloud services with great similarities. First of all, they both support the decentralized reconstruction of large-scale Internet services and the introduction of large AI models into smart contracts on the blockchain. Secondly, their architectures are both designed based on the Actor model.

Actor is the basic unit of a concurrent computing model in computer science. The Actor model is suitable for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems, which is also the origin of the name Arweave AO.

The main differences between the two are in the data storage layer, execution layer, and consensus layer:

• Data storage layer: The smart contract on DFINITY IC is called Canister. Canister has its own exclusive container (similar to Docker). The data of each Canister is encapsulated in its own independent container. The outside world cannot see the details of the data and can only access the internal data through the interface provided by Canister. Arweave AO is based on Arweave, and the data is stored in Arweave and is open to the outside world.

• Execution layer: The virtual machine of DFINITY IC is WASM. Canister code will be compiled into WASM modules to be deployed on IC and only supports standards such as WebAssembly system interface. Arweave AO is more flexible. As long as it follows the AO protocol standard, any virtual machine can be used, including EVM, WASM, Move VM, etc. The current AOS contract development language officially built by Arweave is Lua.

• Consensus layer: The DFINITY IC subnet uses a variant of the BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus, and the subnets are verified through Chain-Key technology. Arweave AO is based on SCP (Storage-based Consensus Paradigm), which is a storage-based consensus paradigm that emphasizes that consensus occurs at the storage layer and uses Arweave for immutable storage to ensure security and verifiability.

From the above comparison, we can find that DFINITY IC still follows the standard paradigm of blockchain, while Arweave AO does not seem to be so blockchain-like. After all, it does not even have a consensus mechanism. So how to ensure that different nodes have consistent calculation results?

The answer is that Arweave AO cannot guarantee the consistency of calculation results, and its calculation results do not produce any proof (such as Merkle tree), but Arweave's immutable storage is verifiable, and calculation and consensus are separated, which is the most ingenious design of Arweave AO.

Arweave stores holographic data of AO and every thread on AO. Anyone can restore AO and any thread on AO through holographic data. This is actually the core idea of ​​SCP, that is, as long as the storage is immutable, the transactions above are traceable, then no matter where the application is calculated, the same result will be obtained.

Once the verifiability problem is solved, the economic model of AO can be used to encourage everyone to provide correct calculation results, similar to the margin mechanism of Chainlink nodes in DON. Nodes need to pledge tokens before joining the AO network. When the nodes provide correct calculation results, they will be incentivized, and when the nodes provide incorrect results, they will be fined.

Summarize

Decentralized cloud services have always been considered one of the most important applications of blockchain. Web3 + cloud services are not only a very good narrative direction, but also very easy to combine with AI narrative to further enhance the imagination space.

Decentralized cloud services have been developed for ten years since IPFS. From a technical perspective, the underlying storage and computing protocols have become more and more perfect. From a market perspective, there is also sufficient demand for resource sharing networks based on computing power. However, there are only a few companies that have achieved this and their performance is far from satisfactory.

Before DFINITY IC went online, it was once considered to be the AWS of Web3, with the halo of the third-generation blockchain. Unfortunately, it suffered the pain of going online, and it has only now turned from negative to positive. Putting aside some market factors, the instant consensus of calculations in a purely asynchronous environment such as cloud services will have extremely high requirements for hardware resources. High hardware resource requirements will affect the degree of decentralization, making the consensus mechanism of blockchain meaningless.

Arweave AO breaks the shackles of blockchain. It does not deal with the calculation itself and the consensus. Instead, it ensures the correctness of the calculation results through economic models and lazy verification. It can be said that it has taken a different approach. However, since the supervision and verification of verifiable calculations based on SCP are all carried out off-chain, there is theoretically a problem of insufficient off-chain supervision. In large-scale computing scenarios, it still needs to be tested by the market, but the future prospects are worth looking forward to.

#filecoin #storj #arweave $FIL $STORJ $AR

IC content you care about

Technology Progress | Project Information | Global Activities

Collect and follow IC Binance Channel

Get the latest news