Exploring Decentralized Storage for Scalable Blockchain Applications | George Danezis - Mysten Labs

welcome to the stage George danzis with exploring decentralized storage for scalable blockchain application great to be here everyone so I'm George denesis I'm one of the five co-founders of miston labs we are the people that uh initiated the sweet blockchain that some of you may have heard of and walrus basically is our new network that we're launching extremely soon so we all have the experience of going on the web and looking for an article that we've seen a while ago that we liked and the article is not there anymore right and and sadly this experience very often carries to the web 3 realm right uh some of us had the experiences buying an nft the nft links through an address that is hosted on let's say some Cloud AWS Google whatever it's there for a while and then it's just gone it disappears someone doesn't pay uh for the storage and the nft disappears even worse we we sometimes have the experiences of daps just disappearing right I mean we we we go to a Dap we think we're having this kind of immutable forever experience we go again the front end is not there and actually as of the you know recent few days we even have the experience where we go to a Dap and we think it's there but actually it's not the correct dap right someone has basically hacked uh the JavaScript changed it with something else and now we're basically signing the wrong transaction and and sending a bunch of eth to uh North Korea that's no good okay so we all have these experiences and and what these experiences really tell us is that without actually having a usable onchain data not just smart contracts not just what is in there which is very little data but actual data such as media front ends JavaScript we can't really realize this onchain future that we've all been talking about okay so this is where walrus comes in and walrus is the second major Network and protocol that Mr Labs is launching and basically the aim of walrus is to put all of that uh data that is around smart contracts be it media associated with smart contracts uh audit logs front ends websites and all of that uh on chain on the walrus basically chain and give that data the same kind of guarantees we give to the data that is in the smart contracts and the integrity and the availability of smart contracts and furthermore uh we do this by lever ing uhu the the L1 that we we build in order to actually make that storage experience quite programmable right and I will want to talk a little bit about the programmability of of walrus as a decentralized storage Network so first of all walrus is a a secure decentralized blob store right what does that mean it is it is a blob store in that it allows you to actually store media images videos websites you know the kind of stuff you would put on Amazon S3 you would publish on the web it is decentralized in that that data doesn't just live in a particular place that you know can take it down and then the data disappears but rather it lives on a decentralized network determined by by delegated proof of stake of storage nodes and it is securing that it provides very high degrees of availability very high degrees of uh uh integrity and very high degrees of authenticity so this is what walrus is and walrus provides a programmable interface to to this kind of decentralized secure store in that all of the control layer of storage namely um you know the ability to pay for storage get basically storage resources that act as something you own and you can trade and you can split like you know a digital asset the ability to upload files control their um their retention policies control basically the metadata associated with them control when they delete and all of that this is all done on a smart contract platform which means that you can basically interact with it through smart contracts and create very rich experiences very rich and very high integrity experiences that combine storage and everything else that is happening on the smart contract platform names defi money Stables etc etc etc so walrus allows us to do things like you know we want to actually build a ticketing dap we keep a lot of the metadata on chain uh such as the time the place you know how much it costs Etc but then we keep the media of uh of the ticket let's say on walrus and in fact walrus provides will provide in the future some confidentiality options which means that basically we can let's say hide half the ticket that is this QR code and only reveal it when the ticket is being redeemed we all had this experience already here uh in having an online ticketing uh platform on a on a blockchain you can basically Implement that whole thing purely on chain using walrus combined uh with site now let me tell you a little bit about walrus as a storage layer under the hood right because there are other decentralized storage layers so what makes W Rus different so first of all traditionally decentralized storage relies on replication right you take a file that you want to store and you just put that file in multiple places and that guarantees that if one of these places kind of is still there tomorrow the file is still available okay all all that is good the problem with that scheme is that replication is very expensive right if you take a file and you put it in 100 places well you have kind of wasted a 100 times the storage that you originally had for the file right so we're not doing that instead what we're using is um Erasure coding and Erasure coding is is a mathematical technique that allows you to take a file expand it to a factor of about four or five and then take chunks of that expanded file and put them everywhere in the network literally on every every single storage node in the network and even though the actual amount of data you you waste in order to store that file is only like five times more than the original file rather than let's say a 100 it is still stored in hundreds or or thousands of places and furthermore we can tolerate about a third to two3 of these nodes that store the little chunks disappearing and still be able to reconstruct the file and furthermore we can tolerate about a third of them disappearing and still be able to actually reads and writ and all of that right so so this is a much more efficient way of storing files in a decentralized network while at the same time uh allowing very high uh Assurance uh reads and very high availability reads um now there is another interesting aspect of of storage networks uh which are kind of different from l1s as well which is that in l1's the more nodes you add right the more miners you add you don't automatically increase the capacity of the network because they all have to do the same job and replicate each other's job to get higher Assurance on the computation storage networks are quite different as I said like the replication Factor how much data has to be stored in the network to to to actually uh secure a file is only five times the original size no matter how many machines there are in the network which suddenly means that the more machines you add to the network the more peers the more storage nodes you add the more capacity you have to actually store files so the capacity goes up as you add more and more resources furthermore the capacity not doesn't just go up in terms of storage but it also goes up in terms of bandwidth that is available to actually serve rights and reads from the storage system which is pretty cool I've already mentioned that walrus comes with a full um smart contract capability integrated into it the way we built walrus is to use sui the blockchain as a control layer so all of the metadata operation of wers happen onui and you can combine them with all the stuff that is happening onu which is a full-fledged uh smart contract platform and the actual data paths are done offchain of the suet chain on the wallr storage nodes that allows us to actually deal with masses and masses of data very very efficiently and very cheaply and finally walrus comes with um a nice set of apps already uh we already have walrus sites that allow you to upload a bunch of resources and make them available to the web you can just go to docs. walrus doite right now and actually see our docs that are hosted on walrus and very soon we're going to actually release seal as well which is a technique need to actually do uh encryption in order to provide confidential storage of uh files in this decentralized store it basically is based on identity based encryption you have key servers that listen to Smart contracts and are controlled by smart contracts to do the access control and you can encrypt under those keys and release Keys according to policies defined by smart contract so it's very flexible you can literally program Access Control using seal and store data uh confidentially on wus using encryption so what's the vision right the vision is that look you know there are a lot of operations that we do uh in decentralized apps that require audit right uh you know if you have a dow if you're creating a charity on on chain Etc it's not just enough to to govern that thing to look at things on chain you actually want to have very rich material about what happened audit logs reports pictures Etc right so walrus allows you to build this kind of hybrid you know hybrid daps between you know some governance that is happening on chain and the actual Rich data you need in order to back that governance um we also are looking forward to you know suddenly the the decentralized web also becoming a Social Web but social webs usually don't just require metadata that we can store online on chains but also require media you want to post pictures you want to post videos you want to actually post 3D stuff uh in your feed and share it with your friends and suddenly walrus combined with s allows you to build these social relationships where that data lives on walrus uh the metadata lives on S and basically it encodes all the uh the logic of the the social and uh furthermore you know you can actually have Brands and all of that stuff kind of rewarding fans let's say that post about foot matches on the blockchain uh that basically track the the social and we also are looking forward to um you know a decentralized science application suddenly having walrus available to store bigger data allows you to to actually store your uh experimental protocols your data sets that that result from experiments your papers and then you can still basically combine these these media with effectively processes that you define on chain for peerreview for funding Etc so you can basically really have these hybrid applications that deal with both the traditional stuff we want to do with smart contracts as well as the rich media that is guaranteed not to be go away and to be actually correct we are going to Market uh with a number of Partners these are just three uh six we have many more so ethum is actually using walrus for decentralized music um distribution one Championship is going to do it for loyalty programs and distribution of um uh you know kind of like fan um fighting videos which which is what they do Talis is using it to build AI agents and AI models that are stored on walrus and are basically driven on chain tusky provides um a clone of Dropbox that is also private uh and decentralized the Crypt media is the well-known um you know trade uh crypto media site uh and they're backing up basically all their stories on walers to make sure they're available if their website goes down and Arham provides uh blockchain analytics that live on chain on rollers so that you can make sure that they're there and they're correct and they're indeed the ones that are published by them as I said we've been running a test net uh since uh about May uh walrus is there for all blockchain ecosystem to use it so you can put basically an ethereum front end on it and access basically ethereum contracts Etc so we're trying to basically serve the whole crypto Community here not just the sweet community and basically we're going to go to mainnet in T1 which basically means within a few weeks and we would be very happy to uh have you try it on testet and then build your projects uh on it after that thank you so much