Decentralised Storage Solutions

The world relies more than ever on cloud storage. The need will only increase. Yet a few corporations currently host most of that data.

The creation of a decentralised storage solution that makes use of the Cardano blockchain, incentivised by a native token.

Number of participants, peers, in the decentralised storage network.

Number of individual users making use of decentralised storage.

Volume of data stored.

Number of organisations and platforms migrated to the decentralised storage solutions.

New applications enabled by decentralised storage.

Impact on the price of storage when compared to centralised storage offerings.

Considering this is a complex task that is not likely to be accomplished, and result in a functioning decentralised storage solution, in a 3 to 6 months timeframe we fully expect that proposal would seek funds in multiple rounds of Catalyst for successful implementation. As such the proposals to this challenge would need to present a detailed timeframe and roadmap to implement a working solution.

The global cloud storage market is projected to grow from USD 49.13 billion in 2019 to USD 297.54 billion by 2027, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.3% during the forecast period.

But perhaps more important than the economic factor, creating a robust, secure and tamper-proof decentralised global storage solution based on blockchain technology would make our data safe, out of the reach of and immune to the whims of large corporations, criminal organisations or leaders of nation-states.

Similar to the projects that already exist like filecoin - https://filecoin.io/ , Holo - https://holo.host/ or the Akash DeCloud - https://akash.network/ storage providers should be incentivised by a token.

Possibly start with designing and implementing a system that would allow stake pool operators to attach and provide storage to their already existing machines.

Use case example:

As a key component in the creation of a trustworthy NFT platform. What use is having the record of ownership on an immutable blockchain, if the work that it points to is no longer accessible? Only the metadata gets stored on the blockchain, if the file it points to is no longer available because the centralised storage it was hosted on is down, the NFT itself loses its value, regardless if it's a piece of digital art, music, or a land lease.

Picture how the media would cover the story of an NTF artwork that somebody paid hundreds of thousands of dollars suddenly not being there anymore. After an event such as that, storage permanence would surely become the biggest thing the general public would be concerned about. We can anticipate this by building it into the system from the get-go and setting it up as one of the key differentiators because there's a possibility it'll end up being.

References:

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/cloud-storage-market-102773

https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-decentralized-storage-a-deep-dive-by-filecoin

https://www.coindesk.com/its-an-nft-boom-do-you-know-where-your-digital-art-lives