Blockchain has revolutionized decentralized finance, and with smart-contracts has enabled the world of Non-Fungible Tokens, set to revolutionize industries such as art, collectibles and gaming. Blockchains, at the very core, are distributed chained hashes. They can be leveraged to store information in a decentralized, secure, encrypted, durable and available format. However, some of the challenges in Blockchain stem from the bloat of storage. Since each participating node will keep a copy of the entire chain, the same data gets replicated on each node, and even a 5MB file stored on the chain can exhaust systems. Several techniques have been used by different implementations to allow Blockchains for distributed storage of data. The advantages compared to cloud storage would be the decentralized nature of storage, the security provided by encrypting content, and the costs. In this session, we will discuss how different blockchain implementations such as Storj, InterPlanetary File System, YottaChain, and ILCOIN have solved the problem of storing data on the chain, but avoiding bloat. Most of these solutions store the data off-chain and store the transactions metadata on the blockchain itself. IPFS & Storj for example, uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting all the computing devices. The incoming file is encrypted, and split into smaller chunks, and each participating node will store a chunk with zero-knowledge of the other chunks. ILCOIN relies on RIFT protocol to enable two level blockchains, one for the standard blocks, and the other for the mini-blocks that comprise the transactions and which are not mined, but generated by the system. Yottachain uses deduplication after encrypting content, which is not generally the way data storage is designed for cloud, to reduce the footprint of data on the chain. We will discuss the tradeoffs of these solutions and how they aim to disrupt cloud storage. We will compare the benefits provided in terms of security, scalability and costs, and how organizations such as Netflix, Box, Dropbox can benefit from leveraging these technologies.

Learning Objectives: 1) Learn about the Blockchains and how they are designed to store small amounts of information; 2) Learn about different blockchain projects such as IPFS, Yottachain, Storj, ILCOIN and their implementations; 3) How blockchain based storage solutions can provide better benefits to existing cloud storage; 4) Impact of leveraging blockchain storage on companies such as Netflix, Box, Dropbox.