Towards the Blockchain Massive Adoption with Permissionless Storage
Jia Kan
TL;DR
The work addresses the hurdle of massive blockchain adoption by decoupling security expenditure from end-user fees through a useful Proof of Work that enables data-encoding tasks for a permissionless storage network, thereby leveraging storage demand to subsidize security costs. It introduces a Proxy Re-Encryption scheme to support cryptographic access control within permissionless storage and proposes Wider sharding, a multi-chain architecture that scales throughput to thousands of transactions per second while preserving decentralization. The combined UPoW storage engine and sharding framework aim to reduce user costs, eliminate mining-pool centralization, and deliver scalable, decentralized applications beyond finance. The approach has practical implications for lowering barriers to entry for blockchain use and enabling real-world deployment of decentralized storage and smart-contract platforms. Future work will focus on operationalizing the storage-driven security engine, optimizing PoRep verification, and further refining cross-shard interoperability and state management to sustain growth and security.
Abstract
Blockchain technology emerged with the advent of Bitcoin and rapidly developed over the past few decades, becoming widely accepted and known by the public. However, in the past decades, the massive adoption of blockchain technology has yet to come. Rather than the scalability issue, the blockchain application is challenged by its expensive usage cost. However, the high cost of blockchain usage is deeply connected with the blockchain consensus and security mechanism. The permissionless blockchain must maintain its high cost for security against the 51% Attack. Chain users indirectly cover the cost as coins are appointed for blockchain usage fees. This conflict prevents the massive adoption of blockchain. Thus, blockchain must be improved to solve those problems: 1. The cost of blockchain usage should be low enough. 2. The blockchain should remain decentralized. 3. The scalability of blockchain must meet the demand. In my thesis, new approaches are applied to solve the issues above. The key contribution is the discovery of the useful PoW. It extends the Nakamoto PoW with another usage of file data encoding during the same Nakamoto Consensus computation to prove honest data preservation. Based on this theory, a permissionless storage network is proposed as the new security engine for the blockchain. It bridges the high blockchain security cost to the storage users with real demands who are willing to pay for the storage resource. On the other hand, the chain users can benefit from the low transaction fee. Meanwhile, we also provide a scalability solution to shard the blockchain. It enables high TPS and keeps decentralization. The solutions in this thesis provide the answers to all the dependencies of the massive adoption.