FileInsurer: A Scalable and Reliable Protocol for Decentralized File Storage in Blockchain

TL;DR

FileInsurer introduces a scalable, reliable decentralized file storage protocol leveraging insurance principles, ensuring robustness and low deposit requirements, suitable for Web 3.0 and Metaverse applications.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel decentralized storage protocol that guarantees reliability through insurance-inspired mechanisms, reducing deposit burdens and enhancing participation incentives.

Findings

Ensures no more than 0.1% file value compensation under certain conditions.

Guarantees robustness and reliability in decentralized storage.

Compatible with IPFS for Web 3.0 applications.

Abstract

With the development of blockchain applications, the requirements for file storage in blockchain are increasing rapidly. Many protocols, including Filecoin, Arweave, and Sia, have been proposed to provide scalable decentralized file storage for blockchain applications. However, the reliability is not well promised by existing protocols. Inspired by the idea of insurance, we innovatively propose a decentralized file storage protocol in blockchain, named as FileInsurer, to achieve both scalability and reliability. While ensuring scalability by distributed storage, FileInsurer guarantees reliability by enhancing robustness and fully compensating for the file loss. Specifically, under mild conditions, we prove that no more than 0.1\% value of all files should be compensated even if half of the storage collapses. Therefore, only a relatively small deposit needs to be pledged by storage providers to cover the potential file loss. Because of lower burdens of deposit, storage providers have more incentives to participate in the storage network. FileInsurer can run in the top layer of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and thus it can be directly applied in Web 3.0, Non-Fungible Tokens, and Metaverse.