Bridging data access, Sukhavati empowers Web3 network benefits!

At 16:00 on the afternoon of June 17, 2021, the big-name sharing session of Liandaodao's live broadcast room specially invited Sukhavati CEO Mindaugas Savickas to conduct a special live broadcast on "Sukhavati - Bridging Data Access and Empowering Web3 Network Benefits". Sakura Xiaoying, the media director of Liandaodao, will have a dialogue with Mindaugas Savickas, and through a question-and-answer format, the hottest content in the industry will be presented to you.

Sukhavati is a decentralized cloud service network with storage as its core. Its mission is to encourage and improve the blockchain distributed storage ecosystem, promote it to become the real infrastructure of the next generation of the Internet, and expand a wide range of application scenarios for the implementation of the Web3.0 vision.

The following is the interview transcript: (with some minor omissions without changing the original meaning)

Guest introduction: Hello everyone, I am Mindaugas, CEO and co-founder of Sukhavati. I am fascinated by the core features of blockchain and decentralized Web3.0 solutions, so I entered the cryptocurrency industry many years ago.

I am currently a graduate of Harvard Business School with more than 11 years of management and marketing leadership experience: building strategic marketing solutions for more than 40 global brands and technology startups. Effectively building and scaling product and marketing teams. Prior to joining Sukhavati, I served as CMO and co-founder of Rokkex (a crypto asset exchange) since 2018. I have also served as CMO of FAST INVEST (a P2P alternative investment platform) and CMO of OXYGEN (a next-generation digital healthcare solution).

I believe in Sukhavati because I agree with its mission, that is, Sukhavati will help the realization of Web3.0 as a decentralized cloud service network with storage as the core. I also believe that through our continuous efforts, Sukhavati's vision will eventually be realized.

Question 1: Let me first introduce Sukhavati to you. Can you use a few keywords or a few sentences to summarize the main features of the project? What is the background of the project?

Mindaugas Savickas: OK. Sukhavati is a decentralized cloud service network with storage as its core. It consists of consensus layer, storage layer and application layer. The consensus layer is based on the PoS space proof/PoC capacity proof mechanism, which can directly reuse the computing power of some existing PoS/PoC protocols. The storage layer proposes EPoSt (Efficient-Proof-of-Spacetime) based on TEE (Trusted Computing Environment) to solve the verification problem of decentralized storage, and can incorporate massive low-power storage devices into the network.

Based on this, Sukhavati will build a decentralized data access gateway covering Web3.0 and Web2.0 storage services at the application layer, providing unified data storage, retrieval and management services for Web3.0 applications. Sukhavati's mission is to inspire and improve the blockchain distributed storage ecosystem, promote it to become the real infrastructure of the next generation of the Internet, and expand a wide range of application scenarios for the implementation of the Web3.0 vision.

Since the birth of the Internet and the Web, we have experienced the Web1.0 era where information is read-only and the Web2.0 era where everyone can produce information on social networks. With the birth of Bitcoin and the emergence of smart contract public chains such as Ethereum, the vision of Web3.0 has once again sprouted in people's minds.

The goal of Web3.0 is to make the Internet more decentralized, secure, and verifiable. The value confirmation, consensus mechanism, and incentive compatibility mechanism brought by blockchain have greatly promoted the realization of the Web3.0 vision, but it is still missing a key component from the real large-scale application, that is, large-scale data storage and retrieval capabilities.

In order to solve the decentralized verification problem of large-scale storage, Filecoin proposed a method of using zero-knowledge proof for verification. However, this method requires a lot of computing power, making the cost of application data storage very high and blocking a large number of small storage devices. This also results in a very concentrated storage distribution.

There are still many problems to be solved in the process of decentralized storage becoming practical. In the future scenarios of Web3.0 and the Internet of Things, a large amount of data will be generated. Web3.0 applications require a secure, highly available, low-cost, and low-power decentralized data access service. This is the background for the birth of Sukhavati.

Question 2: Sukhavati has always received attention from many investment institutions. Can you share with us the current financing progress?

Mindaugas Savickas: Sukhavati Network has just completed a new round of financing of US$8 million. During the financing process, Sukhavati Network has attracted widespread attention from all parties in the encryption field. Many investment institutions from the seed round have continued to express their enthusiasm for the Sukhavati Network project and continue to follow up with investments.

The participating institutions include AU21, OKEx Blockdream Ventures, LD capital, YBB Foundation, Kernel Ventures, Blocksync, CryptoJ, NSG Ventures, Chain Capital, Gate Labs, PrimeBlock Ventures (MXC Labs), Hot Labs, CatcherVC, CCFOX Fintech, Krypto Research, LBK Labs, 7 O'clock Capital, etc.

Sukhavati Network has successfully completed a $2 million seed round of financing. Sukhavati Network's mission is to inspire and motivate improvements to the distributed storage ecosystem, promote it to become the real infrastructure of the next generation of the Internet, and expand a wide range of practical application scenarios for the implementation of the Web3.0 vision.

Sukhavati said that in the future, they will continue to explore the bridging of Web2.0 applications and Web3.0 ecology, provide serverless cloud computing services similar to AWS Lambda, and support a wide range of applications such as 5G networks and edge computing, enriching the practical functions of this key component of decentralized data storage infrastructure.

Question 3: Sukhavati is mainly composed of three basic layers: consensus layer, storage layer, and application layer. Can you give us a brief introduction to each of them? What are the positioning of these three parts?

Mindaugas Savickas: At the consensus layer, Sukhavati uses PoS space proof/PoC capacity proof as the consensus protocol. Its characteristic is that after completing the initial initialization operation, only a small amount of computing and IO resources are needed to maintain a high-security consensus, so that more resources can be used for other meaningful work, and the storage layer and application layer above it are ready. At the same time, Sukhavati can also be compatible with the computing power of some existing PoS/PoC consensus protocols, and use it as a basis for rapid startup.

At the storage layer, Sukhavati implements the EPoSt (Efficient Proof-of-Spacetime) efficient space-time proof mechanism based on TEE design. The storage node completes the proof of storage commitment in the two verification processes of LivingPoSt and WinningPoSt, and uploads the proof results to the chain to obtain incentives for the storage part. EPoSt fully utilizes the advantages of the TEE hardware architecture and rebalances performance and security. Compared with zero-knowledge proof based on pure cryptographic methods, the verification speed can be 100+ times higher. Thanks to this, a large number of long-tail low-power idle storage devices on the edge network, such as home NAS servers, can participate in Sukhavati's storage mining as long as their CPU supports TEE technology, giving full play to its low cost and P2P network transmission advantages.

Why TEE can support such a high verification speed? Let me briefly explain it with a picture that has been written into the white paper:

At the application layer, Sukhavati will build a decentralized data access gateway covering the Web3.0 storage ecosystem and Web2.0 storage services based on the local trusted computing capabilities of the nodes and the flexible expansion capabilities of the Substrate framework, using the storage layer as a medium, connecting various protocol islands, and providing Web3.0 applications with unified data storage, retrieval, and management services that meet compliance requirements.

These three basic layers correspond to different functions, and each layer is built on the basis of the previous layer. The development of the Sukhavati network is divided into three stages, starting from the most basic consensus layer and gradually realizing the vision of the ultimate decentralized cloud service network.

Question 4: One of the core foundations of Sukhavati is storage. How do you view the development of the storage track now? Why did Sukhavati also choose to join the storage track? Compared with the above projects, what are the differentiated positioning and advantages of Sukhavati?

Mindaugas Savickas: Decentralized storage is the prerequisite for the implementation of Web3.0 applications. Currently, there are some representative projects in various segments. For example, in the contract-based storage track, there are Filecoin based on zero-knowledge proof and Crust based on TEE; in the permanent storage track, there is Arweave; in the distributed object storage track, there are Storj and so on. Most of the current projects in these storage tracks are still in the early stages of launch, and there are still many areas that need to be improved, whether in terms of ecological completeness, actual application costs, or the true realization of the Web3.0 concept, there is still a long way to go before actual applications and businesses.

Seeing the current development status of the storage track, as well as the problems and role gaps therein, we decided to establish Sukhavati Network with the goal of improving the Web3.0 storage infrastructure and joining in the construction of this ecosystem.

Unlike the projects mentioned above, Sukhavati aims to build a decentralized data access gateway covering the Web3.0 storage ecosystem and Web2.0 storage services, connecting existing storage protocol islands and providing unified data storage, retrieval and management services for Web3.0 dApps.

To achieve this goal, Sukhavati needs a broad and solid consensus layer. After research, we decided to start with PoS/PoC, which has the largest scale of hard disk mining, and quickly establish a solid consensus layer by reusing the existing PoS/PoC computing power, while covering the group with the largest hard disk storage space in the world.

Next, based on this, Sukhavati will give full play to the advantages of PoS/PoC consensus and the high efficiency of hardware-based TEE technology to establish a storage layer that can provide hot storage capabilities. Thanks to Sukhavati's overall design, any device that supports TEE technology can be added to the storage network to form a truly decentralized topology storage network. Since Filecoin is more suitable for cold storage scenarios, and Arweave is used to store permanent data with high value density, Sukhavati's hot storage layer can be used as a storage middleware in the Web3 ecosystem, sending storage content to different storage networks according to the different needs of dApps.

Question 5: Talking about mining, from Filecoin to the recently popular Chia, the prices of mining machines and hardware equipment have soared. How do you view this market phenomenon?

Mindaugas Savickas: At present, the entry threshold of filecoin is already very high. Complex cluster solutions and customized hardware are no longer directly accessible to ordinary miners. Most miners participate in the filecoin network by purchasing hardware hosted by professional miners.

Relatively speaking, the threshold for participation in Chia is much lower. The surge in hard disk prices when Chia was first launched was actually a very extreme market situation. Excessive speculation on hard disk prices is an irrational behavior. Unlike other commodity hardware, the production capacity of hard disks is relatively flexible. For Sukhavati, it is more about accommodating more mining machines and hardware in the market to participate in the network, rather than wasting resources excessively.

Looking back at history, we can also see that from BTC to ETH to the current Filecoin and Chia, the wave of decentralization is sweeping from computing to storage, and will eventually change every link in the computing system, as well as the production relations and organizational forms on it. From the perspective of historical evolution, we are more convinced that various types of mining based on hard disks will play a greater role in the future. Sukhavati hopes to take on its historical mission in this wave and make efforts to realize and mature the decentralized storage ecosystem.

Question 6: How can users participate in Sukhavati mining? Are there any rigid requirements for hardware, mining machines, equipment, etc.?

Mindaugas Savickas: Before the test network is released, the mining that ERC20 tokens can participate in is liquidity incentive mining, and detailed rules and rewards will be announced in the near future. After the test network is released, storage mining will be launched as soon as possible, and detailed rules will be announced soon. The hardware requirements for mining are much lower than those for filecoin, especially in terms of cluster thresholds. The original intention of Sukhavati is to allow more hardware devices such as POS/POC and storage mining to participate in the construction of the network.

Question 7: In addition to storage and mining, what other application scenarios does Sukhavati have?

Mindaugas Savickas: In the early stages of Sukhavati, PoS/PoC mining at the consensus layer and storage mining at the storage layer will be the key to building a solid foundation. But in addition to these two, in the early stage, the hot storage layer will provide traffic distribution for the existing huge Internet CDN business, and in the middle and late stages, the node-based local trusted computing capabilities will provide a bridge for Web2.0 applications to migrate to Web3.0 and Serverless cloud computing services similar to AWS Lambda. These are all application scenarios that Sukhavati can serve. In the more distant future, we hope that the nodes in the Sukhavati network can participate in 5G networks and edge computing, and become reliable support nodes with efficient consensus and storage mechanisms.

Question 8: From the perspective of the underlying public chain, distributed storage-related projects such as Filecoin, Arweave, and Sia are based on their own public chains. Will Sukhavati also choose to build its own public chain bottom layer?

Mindaugas Savickas: Although Sukhavati is interpreted by the market as "storage middleware", it has always had its own main chain. This is similar to other distributed storage projects. Sukhavati's public chain itself also provides storage services to the market. After all the content that needs to be stored is uploaded to the Sukhavati network, the network can provide storage, retrieval and other basics. At the same time, it can distribute the content to other storage networks (such as: filecoin, Arweave) according to the different needs of the order to meet the diverse needs of web3 applications for data storage.

However, the underlying public chain of Sukhavati is different from most other public chains. Since it can directly reuse the computing power of the existing PoS/PoC network, the public chain consensus layer of Sukhavati is very efficient and environmentally friendly, and only consumes a very small amount of energy to provide a very secure consensus layer. In addition, it can massively expand computing power in the early stage of launch, coexisting with the existing PoS/PoC protocol, while bringing new value and imagination space to these underlying mining equipment.

Question 9: From a storage perspective, does Sukhavati have any regulatory or compliance concerns?

Mindaugas Savickas: Sukhavati was designed with consideration given to the differences in local laws and regulations and the difficulties in regulatory compliance. It can proactively cater to supervision based on the node's local trusted computing technology, turning local laws and regulations into codes that can be reliably executed. This not only implements supervision, but also extends its capabilities, enabling it to conduct more fine-grained compliance management.

Question 10: How is the Sukhavati project progressing so far? What stage has it reached according to the roadmap? When will mining be available?

Mindaugas Savickas: The first phase of Sukhavati's mainnet has been developed and is currently in the internal testing phase. If this process goes smoothly, it is expected that the mining of the testnet can be successfully launched before September. In addition, the current erc20 token (erc-20) liquidity incentive plan will be put into the market in the near future. You can pay attention to the update plan in this area in the official channel.

Official website: https://sukhavati.io

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sukhavati_N

Telegram: https://t.me/SukhavatiNetwork

Telegram announcement: https://t.me/SukhavatiN

reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SukhavatiNetwork/

discord: https://discord.com/invite/nhTd23PMSA

Telegram Chinese: https://t.me/SukhavatiCN

Question 11: Regarding value capture, how is Sukhavati’s token economic model designed? How does it incentivize users to hold tokens for a long time? What are the application scenarios of tokens?

Mindaugas Savickas: The core of Sukhavati's token economic model is designed around the evolution and long-term stability of the entire storage network. The block rewards provide different incentives for various participants at different times in the network.

In the first phase, i.e. the network consensus building phase, the main token rewards will be given to miners who contribute to the network consensus. At the same time, for the sake of long-term security and stability, a considerable portion of the rewards will be allocated to network miners who provide long-term pledges for their computing power.

In the second phase, during the establishment of the storage layer, in order to promote the evolution and development of the network, part of the rewards will be converted into storage mining rewards. In addition, there will be a reward pool in the early stage to reserve rewards for developers who contribute to the development of the ecosystem. Ordinary users can also participate in the funds provided by this reward pool to obtain a longer-term currency-based income.

The third stage is the launch of the application layer. In order to achieve the widespread application of the Sukhavati network, some senator nodes with important strategic resources will be established. After heavy investment in the ecology in the early stage, the corresponding entities can become governance nodes with special functions.

Question 12: How to participate in Sukhavati mining?

Mindaugas Savickas: Sukhavati supports mining using personal computers as well as professional servers.

The mining process is divided into two steps:

1. Plotting

2. Mining

The Plotting process is a one-time process and can be done using the CPU of an ordinary computer. Machines with high memory and SSD can complete the Plotting process faster, but the cost is also higher.

After the P disk is completed, the actual mining phase can begin. The Sukhavati mining process consumes very little energy, requiring only a small amount of local disk IO and CPU, so whether it is a personal computer, a home NAS server, or a device like Raspberry Pi, it can participate in mining, and the energy consumed by mining is also very low.

In addition to considering the physical equipment for mining, we also need to understand Sukhavati's economic model. In Sukhavati's token economy, the income from staking mining is much higher than that from non-staking mining; in the early days before the staking function was opened, all miners could only mine directly with machines. After the staking function is launched, after meeting a certain staking amount, the mining income will be increased by up to 100 times. Therefore, how to choose your own mining strategy is a question that miners must continue to consider.

Thanks to the community and media for their support (in no particular order):