Availability exploration and practice of MEMO decentralized cloud storage

The current state of the Blockchain space and MEMO’s high availability goals:

Blockchain is creating a world of digital assets and open source, but the barriers to its use are still very high. Speed, scalability, user experience and cost have become the biggest obstacles to mainstream user acceptance.

Fortunately, some forward-looking projects are working to change that.

MEMO is a new generation of decentralized storage protocol based on Blockchain technology, and one of its design goals is high availability. Because the current on-chain storage and some decentralized storage projects have some obvious bottlenecks in availability: direct on-chain storage will bring high redundancy and high latency, this model is obviously not suitable for large-scale storage. Some decentralized storage projects generally focus on the construction of the chain and ignore the storage technology itself. Most of them adopt a simple multi-copy redundancy model and lack a corresponding repair mechanism when data fails, which makes both security and storage space utilization a huge challenge.

Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of high availability, MEMO developers have designed a layered architecture, public verification, multi-level fault tolerance and RAFI repair mechanism. The combination of these technologies makes MEMO’s fully decentralized, low redundancy, low energy consumption and highly decentralized cloud storage stand tall in terms of reliability and availability.

MEMO Megrez Version is launched, becoming the decentralized storage layer of Metis.

In June 2021, MEMO Phecda Version was launched online. With the participation of more than 1,000 Providers and more than 7,000 Users, Memo’s security, reliability, availability and system carrying capacity have been verified. Many participants have merged into the friendly ecosystem in the MEMO protocol.

After the operation of Phecda Version, MEMO has comprehensively upgraded the security, availability and application of the protocol. In terms of security, the Keeper role will reach a consensus on the challenge result through Byzantine fault tolerance, reducing the possibility of conspiracy attacks and improving the security and reliability of third-party challenges. At the same time, the transaction data is also submitted to the chain, which greatly improves the security on the basis of increasing the characteristics of data disclosure and non-tampering. In terms of availability, MEMO has further optimized the challenge work, effectively reducing the amount of information transmission in the challenge process, and improving the efficiency of challenge and verification again.

This April, MEMO launched the Megrez Version, a new decentralized storage network. Megrez Version is a formal storage network built on a stable production environment. This version has been tested since November last year and was launched in April this year. The security, reliability, and carry capability of the Megrez Version have been confirmed.

At the same time, MEMO now has opened the Megrez Version public network for the community to use for free and be familiar with the deployment process.

The superimposed experience of MEMO’s security and availability has attracted many partners who also seek security and high availability, and Metis is one of them. In December 2021, MEMO and Metis reached a strategic cooperation. With the official release of Metis on April 13 2022, the MEMO decentralized storage service was provided on the same day.

With the development of multiple application interfaces for Metis’s running nods and its ecological partners, their various types of data such as historical data, NFT metadata, media data, and dAPPs can be conveniently stored on the chain by using the related interface.

Why did Metis choose MEMO as a storage partner?

Metis is a star project of Ethereum Layer2 Rollup, which has shown strong resilience in helping the expansion of the Ethereum ecosystem. Metis has attracted many developers and users to its high scalability (support for multiple virtual machines), versatility (microservice framework, toolkit can be easily extended), high availability (compatible with EVM) and complete decentralization. In the Web3 world, users can easily and efficiently develop dApps, create DAC, NFT and other Web3 applications with low gas costs.

Under the expectations of many users, the official version of Metis was launched on April 13 2022. MEMO has also officially started to provide decentralized storage services for Metis, using the Megrez network built on a stable production environment. Currently, transaction data is being uploaded to the network in an orderly manner.

The cooperation between the two parties is realized through an automated process — the data transmission is automatically uploaded through the sequencer. Specifically, the sequencer will grab the latest batch of transactions on-chain and compile the required transaction data to support fraud prevention. The sequencer will then compute the Merkle root that compiles the transaction data. Next, the sequencer will compute an identifier from the Merkle tree root, which is then used to submit the data to MEMO. Once the data is available in decentralized storage, the Merkle tree nodes are then committed to the Ethereum mainnet as part of the rollup, which is the full flow of batched transactional data rollups. When a validator sees a commit, based on the hash of the commit, the validator will be able to locate and download transaction data from decentralized storage.

The decentralized storage service provided by MEMO has significantly reduced the gas fee of Metis, making Metis an L2 project with the lowest cost and unlimited potential. The key idea is to reduce the size of transaction data by packaging summary data and delaying verification. Thereby reducing the gas fee.

Metis chose MEMO as its storage partner because MEMO and Metis have maintained a high degree of consistency in the concepts of security, high scalability and high availability. MEMO ensures the security, reliability, high availability and high scalability of storage with a layered architecture, an off-chain random sharding public verification mechanism, a multi-level fault tolerance mechanism and an original data recovery mechanism. MEMO has become a storage partner of Metis. Based on the convenient and efficient user experience, the two parties will jointly promote the prosperity and development of the encryption field, opening up a feasible path for attracting more mainstream users to participate in it.