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Cryptocurrency News Articles
Storage: A Key to Resolving the Blockchain Trilemma
Oct 13, 2024 at 05:30 pm
According to Bernie Bloom, overcoming the blockchain trilemma requires building storage solutions that scale to exabytes and integrate seamlessly with smart contracts.
Serial entrepreneur Bernie Bloom, who co-founded Xandeum Labs, has shared his thoughts on the blockchain trilemma, storage solutions, and the future of Web3 with Bitcoin.com News in written responses.
Bloom, a blockchain developer with decades of experience, is known for his contributions to the industry. He has worked on several projects, including Xandeum, which aims to add a scalable storage layer to smart contract blockchains.
In this interview, Bloom shares his insights on the challenges faced by the blockchain industry and how Xandeum’s technology can help overcome them.
Bitcoin.com News (BCN): The blockchain trilemma, as you know, has been a long-standing challenge in the Web3 industry. While newer blockchain solutions have offered significant scalability, they often address only one aspect of the problem. As a blockchain developer who has witnessed the industry’s evolution, how well do you believe the blockchain sector has tackled this problem?
Bernie Bloom (BB): Thanks for that great question. That is the very reason I started working on this trilemma – I can’t see anyone else focusing on this, and I do believe it’s a huge problem that is preventing web3 from getting wide adoption.
We need a storage solution, scalable to exabytes and beyond, that is both random access and is actually built for, with and into smart contracts. So that we can make that “world computer” – that smart contract blockchains are – whole. The only place to store stuff in smart contracts today are accounts – and these accounts just don’t scale with regard to capacity. They are just the RAM of the world computer. Xandeum is adding the badly needed disk.
BCN: When discussing scalability, many people focus on transaction speed. They believe newer blockchains with high transactions per second (TPS) have solved scalability issues. However, storage scalability is equally crucial. How has the blockchain industry performed in this area?
BB: Yes I hear that all the time: “Why does Solana need a scaling solution?”. It is true that the blockchain industry has achieved great success in scaling. For TPS, that is. We have Solana, Ethereum L2s, Avalanche, etc. However – none of them is even trying to address the need for a scalable storage layer. We are lacking a crucial component here. There is a major gap in what the blockchain industry has delivered so far.
BCN: The blockchain industry has evolved in stages, with Web3 currently dominating. To reach its full potential, however, improvements are needed. Regarding storage, do you consider storage scalability challenges a significant obstacle to mainstream adoption?
BB: Yes, absolutely. If Web3 is supposed to take over from Web2, it must have some base technology to support a wide spectrum of apps, just as web2 has. We made blockchain programmable in 2015 – but that is just giving us the CPU and RAM of a huge platform to run apps on. The storage is missing.
BCN: Can you share examples of how the lack of storage scalability has hindered or slowed down blockchain achievements? What are the potential problems the industry may face if the storage scalability bottleneck is not properly addressed?
BB: One simple example is a decentralized version of Wikipedia. People have been arguing about that in the past few years. While Wikipedia is “open”, meaning “anyone” can access and edit, it is still 100% centralized in the sense that a single organization, and in the of Wikipedia likely a single person, can do anything to the Wikipedia database: Censor you, erase you edit history, even add fake edits under your name. The content moderation policies are also being created and enforced in a centralized way.
There are a lot of voices calling for a decentralized version of Wikipedia. Xandeum is actually building Xandipedia as their first demo app. The Wikipedia database is about 250GB, so it cannot be stored in accounts – we need scalable storage for that. Xandipedia will demo the power of Xandeum to the world. And it’s easy to see: If we can decentralize Wikipedia, we can decentralize Airbnb, Ebay, X, and so much more.
BCN: Two elements are basic in the storage system of blockchains: Random Access and Smart Contracts. Could you break these down for our users, explaining what these are, the roles they play, and what stakeholders in the blockchain industry can do to optimize these elements and achieve storage scalability?
BB: We already have scalable decentralized storage, such as Filecoin, Arweave etc. But – as you are pointing out – these are not smart contract native and in many cases not random access. When I say random access I mean something like a Unix file system, where you can open files for reading or writing, position (seek) to any position within the file, read or (over)write an arbitrary number of bytes, delete files etc. These file system like, random access structures have been proven
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