What is Shadow (SHDW)? An article explaining the future development of Shadow (SHDW) in detail

What is Shadow(SHDW)? An article explaining the decentralized storage bound to Shadow (SHDW) and Solana! Recently, Filecoin has been gaining momentum. Previously, BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes also shouted for Filecoin in a speech at Token2049 in Singapore, saying that he holds FIL. In the Solana ecosystem, there is an important and low-key storage project that is not known to many people, and that is GenesysGo --- a blockchain infrastructure provider on the Solana network, focusing on decentralized cloud storage services.

At the same time, when everyone’s attention to the Solana ecosystem was focused on Meme and liquidity staking, GenesysGo’s token Shadow Token (SHDW) has also quietly ushered in a doubling in the past month. increase.

#The storage track is already very crowded, and mature projects include IPFS and Arweave. How does GenesysGo compare to it? And can we usher in more development potential through Solana’s ecological recovery?

Today, the editor of this site will give you a detailed explanation of the decentralized storage Shadow (SHDW) bound to Solana. Friends who need it can take a look!

To understand these issues, we first need to understand the three core businesses of GenesysGo:

• Shadow Operators, RPC layer (decentralized RPC node)
• Shadow Drive, decentralized data storage layer
• Shadow Cloud, decentralized cloud computing platform

Subsequently, we will also discuss the similarities and differences between its token economy and other projects Expand analysis.

Shadow Drive

Shadow Drive is a decentralized data storage layer and the core of GenesysGo, designed to meet Solana’s growing storage needs for the ecosystem.

Previously, for NFT and other storage activities on Solana, third-party storage solutions such as Arweave and Filecoin were often used. However, they are independent storage public chains and are incompatible with Solana. Payment in respective tokens, rather than SPL standard tokens, sometimes cannot keep up with the speed of Solana. Therefore, the storage system native to the Solana ecosystem has become a necessity.

Shadow Drive is an adapted version of open source software called Ceph that defines stored procedures. Ceph provides a unified software-defined solution for block storage, file storage and object storage, and its effectiveness has been widely verified. .

The GenesysGo team integrated Ceph’s open source solution with Solana’s PoH (Proof of History) mechanism to create Shadow Drive.

Shadow Drive is supported by the native token $SHDW. In order to upload data to Shadow Drive, users need to pay a small $SHDW fee.

According to the official documentation of the project, the storage cost of Shadow Drive is cheaper than any similar project on the market. The theoretical price is 5 cents/GiB/year. (Note: 1GB (Gigabyte) and 1GiB (Gibibyte) ) is a term used for computer data storage, indicating the size of data but using different measurement units (1GiB ≈ 1.07GB, which can be approximately understood as equal).

In our testing, a request to create a 1GB storage account only cost 0.25 $SHDW, equivalent to about $0.42 at the time of writing.

The low cost is due to the low gas cost of Solana itself on the one hand, and the reasonable decomposition, scheduling and arrangement of storage tasks by the bottom layer of Shadow Drive. .

This also extends to another topic, the project’s data distribution mechanism ---- D.A.G.G.E.R.

D.A.G.G.E.R. is the abbreviation for directed acyclic gossip graph enabling replication. Since the explanation of this mechanism is too technical, we can simplify it here and understand it as the data distribution mechanism and consensus engine of the project. Its function is to optimize fast data access and file processing, making storage more efficient.

The working mechanism of D.A.G.G.E.R includes several core components: communication module, processor module, consensus module and controller module.

For a transaction, the following processing flow will be simply followed in D.A.G.G.E.R. I will not go into too much detail here:

• Communication module: handles the input and output of the network layer ( Transaction in and out)
• Processor module: Verify the transaction and confirm its correctness and validity
• Consensus module: Each node in the network reaches a consensus on the transaction
• Processing Server module: Transaction is executed

Overall, what we can feel is that Shadow has made a lot of optimization efforts on "how to store data".

Shadow Operators

Shadow Operators are operators that run RPC nodes.

RPC node, or remote procedure call, is a term used in distributed computing systems. RPC can be classified as an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows computer programs to communicate with each other.

Simplified flow chart of sending transactions on Solana

Compared with other public chains, Solana has very high transaction processing capabilities, so the Solana blockchain RPC networks have much higher workloads than other networks. Therefore, existing RPC network providers built on other blockchains will need to completely redesign their architecture if they plan to migrate to Solana.

This also gives GenesysGo the opportunity to provide Solana's native RPC service.

GenesysGo provides three RPC services, including one free service and two paid subscription services. In paid RPC services, fee revenue is paid entirely to Shadow Operators. In addition, Shadow Operators also need to stake $SHDW tokens to provide services and face penalties in the event of service interruptions.

As of the time of writing, there are already 120 RPC operators running on the test network, which is about 5 times higher than the 27 operators a year ago (data in December 2022).

Shadow Cloud

Shadow Cloud is a decentralized cloud computing platform launched by GenesysGo and also provided by Directed Acyclic Graph (DAGGER) Technical Support.

With the above nodes and storage services, GenesysGO can use its capabilities to provide a decentralized cloud computing platform to support the computing and processing needs of different applications.

This platform is designed to support decentralized storage, computing and network operations, providing a broader infrastructure for Web3 and decentralized applications.

However, judging from the current progress, GenesysGo's storage and RPC products appear to be more intuitive, with complete technical documentation and product design, while cloud services are more like a later development strategy and are the first two products. The result after accumulation to a certain extent.

Competitive product comparison: only fast but not broken

Generally speaking, there are many mature cases in the Web2 and Web3 fields regarding decentralized or distributed storage. For example, in the Web2 field, there are distributed storage systems headed by Google BigTable. In the Web3 world, Arweave and Filecoin are the most commonly used third-party storage solutions in blockchain.

So what are the significant features of Shadow Drive compared to competing products? We might as well take Filecoin as an example for comparison.

First of all, as mentioned above, Arweave and Filecoin are not fully compatible with Solana. If you only consider serving the Solana ecosystem, you will definitely need a specialized storage infrastructure:

• Arweave Neither $AR nor $Fil, the tokens of Filecoin, are SPL native tokens (SPL is Solana’s token standard)
• The throughput of Arweave and Filecoin cannot keep up with Solana, which can easily lead to transaction failure

Secondly, Shadow Drive’s consensus mechanism brings better storage efficiency:

• Filecoin uses the Expected Consensus (EC) mechanism and DAG to achieve consensus, which requires explicit approval and block weight are used for final confirmation, the efficiency may be compromised.
• D.A.G.G.E.R. adopts a leaderless asynchronous architecture to achieve consensus through a graphical representation of the DAG, eliminating the need for leader election and allowing transactions to be processed immediately.

Finally, Shadow Drive is optimized for data encoding:

• D.A.G.G.E.R. integrates erasure coding encoding into the architecture to optimize metadata replication and data transactions. Filecoin allows erasure coding as an optional client-side strategy, focusing on data replication and periodic proof of storage.

We will make an intuitive list and comparison of the key performance indicators of the two:

Filecoin Performance Indicators:

• Transaction Speed: Each block time is approximately 30 seconds.
• Confirmation time: approximately 1 hour for high value transfers of 120 blocks.
• Data Storage: 1 MiB file takes 5-10 minutes from transaction acceptance to appearing on the chain.
• Sector Sealing: On minimum hardware, 32 GB sectors take approximately 1.5 hours.
• Data retrieval: Fast retrieval methods (unsealed copies of data) can be assumed to take less than 2 minutes; on minimal hardware, unsealed retrieval can take approximately 3 hours for 32 GiB sectors.

ShdowDrive/DAGGER Performance Metrics:

• Peak TPS: 50,000 transactions per second on specified machine configuration (ideal network).
• Surge TPS: ~20,000 - 38,000 transactions per second under live testnet phase 1 conditions (version 0.2 - 0.3, independent operator with 20-30 node cluster size).
• Real World TPS: ~3,000 transactions per second under real world stress, churn, etc.
• Data Storage: 1MiB file uploaded to DAGGER Hammer Demo takes 2-8 seconds, which emulates shdwDrive v2 to store portions of the application.
• Erasure coding time: 0.018 ms per 1 MiB per core, negligible when scaling horizontally.
• Snapshot download: 10ms to 50ms for 1 MiB file.
• Block synchronization time: between 30ms and 300ms, depending on latency.
• Block verification time: Below 500 nanoseconds to 20 milliseconds, indicating minimal latency.
• Finalization time: 70 ms to 650 ms, average around 273 ms (on the live test network phase 1 30-node global cluster powering the DAGGER Hammer demo site)
• Data Retrieval: It takes 1-3 seconds to retrieve a 1MiB file through the URL on the DAGGER Hammer demo site

To sum up, it is too long to look at the version. The biggest feature of ShdowDrive is that it is fast.

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