IPFS Force Zone x Neo: The road to distributed storage

This article was written by Carl from IPFS Force Zone

In 2017, the digital asset market was very hot, and I believe many coin friends still remember the grand scene of that year. As a long-established domestic public chain project, Neo was also widely popular in the community at that time and achieved very good market performance. So after several years of development and precipitation, what kind of layout is Neo making now?
At the 134th Force Open Day event, we were fortunate to invite Neo Foundation technical expert Liu Rendong to share one of Neo’s key layout directions - distributed storage.

Distributed storage is a vast blue ocean
The number of Internet users in 2019 was 4.39 billion, an increase of 366 million (9%) compared to January 2018. The increase in Internet users has brought about a steady growth in Internet data, while the upgrade of 5G and communication infrastructure will bring about an explosive growth in data. It is estimated that by 2025, the world will generate 463 EB of data every day - equivalent to the amount of data stored on 212,765,957 DVDs.
In the storage market, the global memory market exceeded US$80 billion in 2017, with a growth rate of 10%. The global cloud storage market size increased from US$30.7 billion in 2017 to US$88.91 billion in 2020, with an average annual growth rate of more than 20%. The storage market size is getting bigger and bigger.
Faced with the rapid growth of data, the drawbacks of traditional centralized storage are gradually exposed. For example, Equifax exposed the information of 143 million American citizens; Tencent Cloud hard drive failure caused the complete loss of online production data of startups; Facebook leaked personal information of more than 200 million users... The shortcomings of centralized storage in terms of repair capabilities, server stability, data privacy and security have provided a vast blue ocean for distributed storage. Distributed storage projects in the Neo ecosystem
Liu Rendong introduced in his sharing that NeoFS is a distributed object storage network developed by Neo SPCC. Integrated with the Neo blockchain, the service is designed to work with Neo smart contracts to support truly decentralized applications, providing users with full control over their data.

Nodes are systematically arranged in a peer-to-peer network, responsible for the storage and distribution of user data. Any Neo user can participate in the NeoFS network and, in addition, be rewarded for providing storage resources to other users or storing their data in NeoFS, and pay a competitive price for this.
NeoFS combines homomorphic cryptography and game theory models to ensure zero-knowledge data verification, thereby ensuring user data security and mitigating attacks from malicious nodes .
NeoFS is a blockchain project under the Neo ecological framework. The storage space is rented and used using Neo's GAS as a medium token, and there is no unique token. In addition, NeoFS is more about expanding the capabilities of the Neo blockchain and improving its distributed storage capabilities. Because the participation threshold is low, NeoFS has a built-in reputation mechanism similar to that of Taobao merchants, and storage nodes that provide good services will receive better recommendations.

In summary, although Filecoin, NeoFS, Sia, Storj, etc. are all projects in the same track and have their own advantages in underlying design, distributed storage is still a blue ocean and is far from reaching the point where they need to compete on the same stage. It is more important to learn from each other's advantages and work together to promote the development of the distributed storage industry.