Polkadot Ecosystem Storage Crust attracts market attention, with rich airdrop rewards in June

Distributed storage has recently become the focus of everyone's attention. Previously, Chia's hard disk mining made many miners focus on hard disks, and Swarm in the Ethereum ecosystem has also attracted a lot of attention; Filecoin, which is dedicated to the storage field, has been online for half a year, and the effective data in the network is increasing... There is no doubt that the distributed storage track has attracted more and more attention from industry insiders. Of course, the recent auction of parallel chains in the Polkadot ecosystem has made the Polkadot ecosystem even more popular; the project parties participating in the auction of parallel chain slots are ready to rise. As a rising star in storage projects, the Crust storage network based on the Polkadot ecosystem adopts a unique competitive strategy and has won the favor of many storage miners...

Crust is a decentralized storage network based on the Polkadot ecosystem. We all know that the current decentralized storage networks are mainly represented by the Filecoin storage network represented by the IPFS protocol, the Swarm network based on Ethereum, AR and other storage public chains, while Crust is a storage network built for the Polkadot ecosystem, which mainly provides data storage space for various parallel chains and public chains in the Polkadot ecosystem, and constitutes the underlying ecological system of the WEB3.0 ecosystem based on Polkadot.

Although there are many blockchain cloud storage projects now, Crust's efforts to build a cloud storage service based on the Polkadot ecosystem still have great prospects, which are mainly reflected in the following aspects:

1. High throughput capacity and fast data processing and distribution capabilities

We all know that with the development of the Internet, centralized storage is largely limited by the network throughput for users, which will bring huge traffic costs. Distributed storage, on the other hand, will improve user download throughput and file transfer speeds by distributing files to every corner of the Internet.

When we need to download files from the Internet, the distributed storage network will connect multiple nodes to our host to maximize the download speed. For the blockchain nodes that control the storage network, if the block speed cannot keep up with the network speed, it may cause inconvenience in use. For example, the Ethereum network we see now, due to the popularity of DEFI, the gas fee continues to rise, resulting in increasing costs. Even if the fee has dropped now, there is no guarantee that there will not be more ecological applications like DEFI in the future that will have more impact on the network. Therefore, for Swarm on Ethereum, it may be subject to certain bottlenecks.

As for Crust, since it uses IPFS-related technologies and has made great optimizations on the technical level, it achieves very fast speeds in actual data storage and distribution, and the network throughput will also be improved. The current performance has exceeded that of the Filecoin network. It can be said that Crust's current performance is excellent.

2. Powerful cross-chain capabilities and application scenarios

Currently, there are relatively few usage scenarios for the Filecoin network. Although many DAPP applications are still under development, we have not yet seen a series of results. The relevant development teams still have room for growth. This is one of the reasons why some people remain on the sidelines about Filecoin.

As for Swarm, although it has the support of Ethereum ecology, Swarm will develop with the help of the current mainstream DEFI or NFT ecological applications, but we also observe that the current Ethereum ecology and development direction are too single, which may make it difficult to have development prospects if it is not expanded in the future. Although L2 may make Ethereum further develop, before the arrival of ETH2.0, it is still difficult to see the explosion brought by Ethereum smart contracts and DAPP. Therefore, in the short term, the development of Ethereum storage is still subject to certain restrictions.

As for Crust, since Polkadot’s ecosystem is mainly based on parachains and cross-chains, that is to say, any parachain project in the Polkadot ecosystem will use Crust’s related storage services through cross-chain technology. If we compare Filecoin and Swarm to fighting alone, then Crust is a collective fight. In this way, Crust serves a group public chain ecosystem, and Crust’s development has relatively more opportunities.

3. Expansion capabilities in the Polkadot ecosystem

We all know that the Polkadot ecosystem is mainly building a new generation of Internet based on WEB3.0, and a large number of ecological applications will inevitably be developed on top of it. By comparing it with the current mobile Internet, we can imagine that the future WEB3.0 ecosystem will bring changes to people in all aspects, and these changes will inevitably require the ability to store underlying data.

At present, these demands are mainly based on the powerful expansion capabilities of WEB3.0, so this will also bring about the development of distributed data storage. Crust uses the TEE trusted execution environment to ensure the privacy of distributed storage data, thereby ensuring the security of data use and avoiding the risk of data leakage. We see that Crust is a cloud storage service based on the development of the Polkadot ecosystem, and Crust also received funding from the Polkadot Ecological Fund in the early stage, so it will soon be integrated into the Polkadot ecological family. This will make Crust stand out from the distributed storage applications first and gain attention.

Although the Polkadot ecosystem WEB3.0 is still developing, Crust has been applied in many scenarios of blockchain DAPP. Because Crust officials have always encouraged developers to develop applications, Crust has established Crust Grants, and developers have developed more friendly and convenient to C applications based on the Crust storage layer, and given developers a maximum reward of 30,000 US dollars. For example, decentralized cloud APP web pages, NFT metadata storage, smart contract code storage, data ledgers of other blockchain networks, decentralized video websites, etc. require distributed storage. We mainly introduce the decentralized cloud DAPP web pages and NFT metadata storage functions, which are also mature technologies and functions in normal use.

1. Decentralized cloud DAPP webpage

The Crust storage network has been used in multiple DEFI projects, realizing the seamless deployment of DAPP web pages on Crust. The Crust technical community has also specially developed corresponding tools to help users deploy popular DAPPs such as uniswap, sushiswap, Compound, and MakerDAO on Crust. When these DEFI websites cannot be accessed normally, people can continue to use them normally through the Crust network to avoid potential asset losses due to website access problems.

2. NFT metadata storage

With the recent popularity of NFT, many NFT tokens have been created, and saving NFT metadata has become a very critical step. The main feature of NFT is that each token has unique attributes and numbers, and these attributes are different metadata URLs. In the past, the metadata files of these URLs were only stored in centralized servers. Once the server crashes or maliciously tampered with the file data, the NFT will also be changed.

Now, using Crust's IPFS storage network can solve this problem. Since data files are stored in a decentralized form in the Crust network, it is impossible for them to be tampered with or the links to become invalid, thus forming a permanently valid NFT. Currently, most NFTs on the market are stored using IPFS technology, which also gives Crust a great development advantage.

03Crust Shadow and Kusama Parachain Slot Auction

The name of Crust's token is CRU. It has been listed on multiple mainstream exchanges and is mainly used for various activities in the Crust network, such as token incentives for network storage nodes and node token staking, storage space usage fees and discounts, voting and governance of the Crust network, handling fees for network activities, etc.

Crust Shadow is a parallel network of Crust's Kusama version. We can temporarily consider Crust Shadow to be a previous version of Crust. Crust Shadow's token is CSM. Crust Shadow uses Crust's early new function code, mainly to detect the operation status of related new functions. When the new function runs normally on Crust Shadow, it will be added to the Crust network later after code review.

The main function of CSM is to pay users for storage on the Crust Shadow network, provide token incentives for nodes participating in the Crust Shadow network, and provide storage functions for Kusama and various parallel chains, so that each pilot network can have a complete and rich pilot network environment system for verification and testing of the latest functions, and provide a test scenario for the future code improvement and formal deployment of the Polkadot ecosystem.

Crust Shadow is currently designed as a parallel chain of Kusama, so it will participate in the parallel chain auction of Kusama in the near future. To this end, Crust officials also held a series of airdrop activities to give participants a large number of CRU and CSM tokens.

The main functions of CSM are: staking mining of the Crust Shadow network, providing guarantees for the Crust Shadow network, handling fees for using the Crust Shadow network, fees for purchasing resource services, on-chain governance voting, and participating in Crust main preview network storage market activities. These functions basically cover all aspects of the use and governance of the Crust Shadow network. Users also have many usage scenarios when using the Crust Shadow network, which provides strong support for the usage scenarios of CSM.

The total initial issuance of CSM tokens is 200 million. According to the white paper, the initial token distribution is mainly distributed to participants through the community for free. Because of this, the official has recently started a series of intensive airdrop operations, in which there are mainly two ways to participate.

1. Airdrop to community users through CoinMarketCap airdrop event

The total amount of airdrop is 9,000,000 CSM, with a total of 1,000 copies, each with 9,000 CSM. A random whitelist mechanism is adopted. The website is https://coinmarketcap.com/airdrop/. The airdrop time is 12:00 UTC on June 21st - 12:00 UTC on June 30th. The airdrop will be distributed to the whitelisted Crust Maxwell wallet account before July 5th.

2. Support Crust Shadow’s Kusama parachain slot auction

Crust Shadow held a Crowdloan event to bid for the Kusama parachain slot, locking up KSM for Crust to bid for the Kusama parachain and share 90,000 CRU and 18,000,000 CSM.

The event started on June 9th and lasted for 48 weeks, with rewards distributed every week. The most recent reward distribution was on June 23rd.

During the crowd-lending activity, 1KSM will be rewarded: 0.07 CRU + 14 CSM (per week). The reward will be issued once a week. Regardless of whether Crust can be successfully auctioned, supporters can get rewards. If the auction fails, the supporter's KSM will be returned immediately after the crowd-lending period ends.

If the slot is successfully bid, the supporter will receive a reward of 1KSM: 1.5 CRU + 300 CSM. 30% of the reward will be paid out at the end of the crowd-lending activity, and the remaining 10% will be paid out in each rental cycle.

Users holding KSM can participate in the Crust Shadow voting through the relevant pages of exchanges such as OKEX, Kraken Exchange, and Hotbit.

Okex voting link: https://www.ouyi.cc/earn/slotauction

If your coins are stored in a wallet, you can visit https://ksm.newland.finance and use MathWallet and other related applications to vote on governance.

In addition to the official CSM activity, there is also an activity to experience data storage and stake CSM to get CRU tokens. Investors can participate in the CSM staking and CRU token activity through the website https://apps.crust.network/#/CSMStaking. The airdrop activity will last from June 20 to December 17, a total of 180 days. 400 CRU tokens will be awarded every day in the first 90 days, and 200 CRU tokens will be awarded every day in the next 90 days. In this activity, we will issue a total of 54,000 CRU to users, and the activity will last for 180 days.

For WEB3.0 applications in the Polkadot ecosystem, there will be a large number of projects developed based on Polkadot in the future, and the storage network as a basic service will also have a large market demand. Crust, as a storage network project in the Polkadot ecosystem, will naturally develop further due to the rise of the Polkadot ecosystem. Because of this, the development progress of the Crust network project will inevitably be relatively more cautious. In this way, Crust Shadow also serves as the current version of the Crust network, providing Crust with a more realistic usage environment experience. Since Crust Shadow is a parallel chain on Kusama, it will naturally gather a large number of start-up teams to develop projects, which also allows the functions of Crust Shadow to be further tested.

In addition, the current price of Crust tokens in the secondary market is not low, and the space storage cost of Crust may have an upward trend in the future. Therefore, for some start-up teams, they may not use the Crust network to develop their own applications from the beginning, but instead use the lower-cost Crust Shadow to develop DAPPs. When the team's products are relatively mature, they can be seamlessly transplanted to the Crust network. This is also a very friendly development method for the development team. Therefore, we can see from these two aspects that Crust Shadow will also have a strong application prospect.

The second issue of Interstellar Vision’s Kusama parachain auction special column is coming soon. See you at 19:00 on June 28th. Scan the QR code to enter the event group first.

Six weeks of battle, surprises every week, stay tuned every Monday to receive airdrops.