This group of people has solved the "storage power" problem of Web3

Even the most mainstream solutions currently, such as Ethereum, have no solution to these two points.

Tian Shikun, the technical director of Ant Chain LETUS, believes that the storage performance of Ethereum will rapidly decay as the data scale continues to increase. When faced with applications such as Web3 that have increasingly higher data scale and performance requirements, in terms of performance (latency and throughput) ), cost and other aspects no longer have much advantages.

Yan Ying also said that Ethereum’s storage space today is 12TB, and (data) is basically growing at a rate of 1.5 times every year. This means that if a cloud disk is 16TB, Ethereum’s data may exceed this cloud disk by next year. capacity limit.

On one side is the growing demand, on the other side is the bottleneck of existing technology. If you want to survive in the gap, you must open up a new path.

The self-developed blockchain storage engine has begun to be put on the agenda by Ant Chain.

Back to April 2019.

At that time, Ant Chain's supply chain finance "run" successfully for the first time. Not only was it a new version of Ant Chain, but it was also the first time that full-link privacy protection was also successfully run.

Yan Ying told Leifeng.com that at that time she was mainly responsible for the core technology of TEE privacy protection, so she was "very impressed and very excited."

However, this excitement did not last long. As the program ran longer and longer, problems slowly emerged. Supply chain finance is oriented to ToB (enterprise side). Unlike ToC side, which has data at all times, there may be a transaction with very large status data at a certain moment, such as every night. After running for a week, I found that the performance is getting worse. The slower. Yan Ying told Leifeng.com.

During this period, the team also tried various technical methods to optimize it. Just like squeezing out toothpaste, after optimizing once, the situation will be somewhat alleviated. However, after repeated attempts, the team found that the performance that appeared as the number increased was an unavoidable bottleneck that needed to be fundamentally solved. "

As a result, Ant Chain began to enter the second phase of formal research and development.

But the first phase of optimization was not all-inclusive.

Second, data locality. A large number of hash codes make the distribution of data in storage random, such as account IDs, and the locality of data is related to the efficiency of the entire storage performance. If the data is distributed randomly, it is very unfriendly to the disk. In order to manage these scattered data, the underlying storage system needs to do more additional processing, such as data sorting, etc.

In addition, there are common cost, performance, and scale bottleneck issues.

It’s not that no one has tried to solve these problems.

Tian Shikun introduced that the industry has made many attempts, which can be roughly summarized into three routes: weakening verifiable traceability, optimizing the kv database, and optimizing the Merkle tree. However, no matter which route is taken, facing the scale expansion of data brought about by the future development of Web3 applications, it is impossible to provide an optimal path that can completely solve all problems.

The blockchain storage engine LETUS launched by Ant Chain can solve these problems well.

On the one hand, LETUS comprehensively optimizes storage performance, scale and cost through verifiable index customization, distributed cluster expansion, asynchronous parallelism and other technologies, and can stably support a scale of 2 billion accounts.

On the other hand, LETUS further reduces storage costs through intelligent temperature control tiered storage and boundary scan batch cropping.

LETUS's verifiable technology provides data integrity guarantee for chain storage, ensuring data security and reliability. Under TPS for the same business, disk bandwidth can be reduced by 95%, space usage can be reduced by 60%, and CPU consumption can be reduced by 70%. Block hot and cold stratification and historical status trimming are available for production, supporting further cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

This is a blockchain storage engine answer sheet that Ant Chain took four years to deliver.

In Yan Ying's view, the entire team faced great pressure during the four-year project cycle. "The storage engine is different from application layer reconstruction or simple performance optimization. It is a complete database. It has very high requirements in terms of integrity, performance, and security production."

At the same time, four years ago, the concepts of Web3 and the Metaverse were still in a chaotic state. No one knew where the future would be. Where are the opportunities?

"We are moving in the direction of infrastructure, and we are also thinking about value. Should we insist on investing?" Tian Shikun told Leifeng.com that there were struggles in the process, but it is true that we cannot "become fat in one bite" and can only go step by step. Come down.

Fortunately, the result is good. Four years later, Web3, the metaverse, and blockchain have become new "historical opportunities", and the performance of the storage engine LETUS coincides with the needs of "history".

The reason why it is released publicly at this time is that it has been polished in multiple scenarios within Ant and has the potential to empower external technology.

In June 2021, based on the status data of the LETUS storage engine, the Alipay payment code skin digital collection will be launched in grayscale, effectively supporting flash sale scenarios.

In June 2022, the storage engine LETUS was fully implemented on the Ant digital collection platform Whaletan, realizing the switch from grayscale double writing to single writing, and while improving the performance level by 200%, it also reduced storage costs in the production environment by 75%.

Looking back at the Ant Chain brand upgrade press conference in July 2020, Jiang Guofei once marked a positioning for Ant Chain: starting from the block and linking industries.

Now, looking back, Ant Chain has been practicing this development path.

Technically, in the past two years, Ant Chain has successively released innovative technology products such as blockchain all-in-one machine, new generation blockchain high-speed communication network BTN, trusted on-chain MaaS module, data privacy collaboration platform FAIR, and blockchain security chips. .

We insist on self-research in areas such as consensus protocols, smart contracts, network transmission, storage engines, cross-chain technology, and privacy protection and have always been at the global leading level.

First of all, the first step in upgrading industrial digitalization is to complete the digital transformation of assets.

AntChain, together with Fibocom and Quectel partners, launched the wireless communication module AntChain MaaS, which allows terminal devices to automatically connect to the blockchain through a root of trust based on the unique characteristics of the device, enabling trusted uploading of IoT data to the blockchain.

In this way, a large number of dormant physical equipment assets are activated, and a hard link from the physical world to the digital world is established through a small module.

This is like the POS machine in the mobile payment era, which solves the problems of fair transactions and entrustment among customers, shopkeepers, and clerks, allowing asset transactions that would not have occurred to occur, and cooperation that would not have been possible.

Huatie Emergency is a leading enterprise in engineering equipment leasing, with more than 180 leasing service centers across the country, and aerial work platforms and other equipment assets exceeding 10 billion. How to manage these "heavy assets" with "light methods" is the key to improving China Railway's operational capabilities.

Huatie Emergency and Ant jointly developed the T-box, a trusted terminal for engineering machinery, to enable high-altitude working equipment to automatically connect to the blockchain and realize the "on-chain" source of equipment operation data. Based on trusted data, related parties such as producers, operators, lessees, and financial institutions can be connected through the blockchain, allowing funders to understand the operation of equipment in real time and strengthen revenue estimation and risk control of equipment assets. It also allows operators to improve equipment management and operational efficiency based on data.

Secondly, it realizes the digitalization of assets and the circulation of data assets. Ant Chain deeply integrates the advantages of privacy computing and blockchain to develop a privacy collaboration platform (FAIR). The collaboration process is driven by smart contracts, and the data flow is solved by the privacy computing engine. The blockchain technology is used to confirm the ownership, register and trade consensus. In the process of data sharing, personal information is effectively protected, and the whole process can be recorded, verified, traced and audited.

In the era of digital economy that emphasizes "data flow", the importance of the FAIR platform is self-evident.

Blockchain technology is the technological starting point of Ant Chain.

In Jiang Guofei's view, the essence of the development of blockchain technology is like the transportation of goods by rail. We not only need small stations one after another, but also elements such as rails, cars, loading and unloading, and road safety to ensure circulation, and blockchain technology is a series of complex and criss-crossing rails.

When transporting goods by railway, there is no "choosy" approach to goods.

In the future, the application of blockchain should also be pan-industry. It will reshape existing productivity, means of production and production relations in all walks of life on a global scale, allowing trust to flow as freely, efficiently, transparently and in a peer-to-peer manner as information.

But standing at the moment, it is still a grand narrative, full of fascinating unknowns.

As a "road builder", what Ant Chain is doing now is to continue to invest in research and development in the fields of basic and innovative technologies to build bigger and better roads in a down-to-earth manner.