Crust Network AMA Recap
CryptoDiffer team
Hello, everyone!
We are glad to meet here
Leo Wang (Co-Founder at Crust Network)
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Hi everybody
CryptoDiffer team
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community ?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Hi everyone this is Leo. I am the co-founder of Crust Network, in charge of technologies and products. My background was mainly on IT industry. I’ve been in this industry for over 15+ yrs now. Previously I’ve been working in Microsoft and Cisco as senior development lead. Was doing lots of stuff on distributed storage and blockchain.
CryptoDiffer team
Q2: Can you briefly tell us what is Crust Network in 3-5 sentences?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Crust provides a decentralized storage network of Web3 ecosystem. It supports multiple storage layer protocols such as IPFS. It leverages TEE tech for storage work validation, and Polkadot’s Substrate tech framework for chain. It aims to build a decentralized cloud ecosystem that values data privacy and ownership.
CryptoDiffer team
Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved and about your upcoming plans?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
We got most of our code open source on GitHub. We have published the TestNet (Maxwell CC2) and it can be viewed on different channels like subscan and telemetry. Next we are going to publish the TestNet V2 (Maxwell 2.0) in late October, it’s gonna be incentive TestNet, and we’ll invite wider range of miners to join the net. The mainnet is planned to be launched by end of this year.
Also tomorrow we will have an Auction for the CRU token. This will be the first chance for the public to get their hands on CRU. After that, then we will explore DEX/CEX listings.
CryptoDiffer team
Awesome, a lot of updates to come out!
Thank you for great answers!
I think it is time to start community questions round!
Cryptodiffer Community
Crust uses a double consensus of Meaningful Proof of Work and Guaranteed Proof of Stake
What are the individual usefulness of these 2 algorithms
How can I run a node or validator for crust
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
So it’s actually not double consensus. MPoW is offchain, it uses work inspectors running in TEE to inspect storage work and generate work reports within TEE, and then upload the report to chain. So to be accurate, MPoW is actually not the ‘consensus’. So on top of MPoW workreports, we build our GPoS consensus, derived from Polkadot’s NPoS to generate blocks and distribute block rewards based on MPoW work reports. In order to run a node, you can go to our website and find the TestNet —> Join TestNet, there’s a full guide to do that.
Cryptodiffer Community
What your plans in place for global expansion, are Crust focusing on only market at this time? Or focus on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships? Can you explain this?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Crust mainly has 2 markets to target.
Crust Cloud is our version of Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive. An app that users can easily upload and download files to our decentralised cloud platform. Crust Cloud is currently in the early stages of testing, and users can check it our already.
Crust also offers file storage services for DApps and businesses. We see this as a huge market, as more DApps are being built and many of them have large requirements for data. The best option for these businesses is to be on a decentralised platform where their data is secure, and can easily, quickly, and cheaply accessed (compared to using something like AWS). We are speaking with a few businesses and dapps already, and hope we can have more announcements soon, closer to when the mainnet launches.
Cryptodiffer Community
Are you a global project or local project? Can anybody anywhere use Your project without any restrictions?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
We are a global project. We plan to have “miners” (people and businesses that provide storage services) around the world, much like how bitcoin miners are based globally. Having service providers worldwide means that users worldwide will have faster access to files, which is one of our key features.
Anyone with an internet connection and files that need storage can use our services through the Crust Cloud service. This is a program like iCloud or Dropbox for easy storage and retrieval of files.
Cryptodiffer Community
1. CRUST is not the first decentralized storage network I have heard of, there are others, like RiveX, that work reslly well. Which unsolved problem of the crypto space is solved in Crust network?
2. What is the Meaningful Proof of Work consensus in the Crust ecosystem as decentralized storage? Which improvements does Meaningful Proof of Work have from the classic PoW of BTC?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Yeah there are already several projects of this space out there. Crust’s trying to build a decentralized network without relying on “super nodes” or trustable nodes, or things like that. The core problem it addresses is sort of similar as Filecoin targets: to prove that a node has really done its storage work without cheating or monitoring from external super nodes. It uses a different way (TEE) to make sure the mining servers are cheap and easy for miners to join; also to give a better support on privacy protection; thirdly, it is closely integrated with Polkadot’s ecosystem, so can be easily used by DApps as well.
Cryptodiffer Community
Crust’s GPoS (Guaranteed Proof of Stake) consensus uses storage resources as a guarantee. Can you tell us how crust’s take this gurantee ?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
It is like NPoS with stake limit per node. In NPoS, you don’t really have a limitation on how many tokens you can stake up on a node. But with GPoS, each node has a stake limit, or quota. That quota is actually calculated based on the storage resources it provides.
Cryptodiffer Community
Where is CRUST road map now? Are all targets in accordance with the current road map? and what are the next steps that will be taken in the future?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
We have a short roadmap on our website (https://crust.network/). Recently some of our key milestones are the launch of the Maxwell testnet, as well as the soft launch of the Crust Cloud service. Moving forward, another key milestone will be the launch of the mainnet, which will be in Q4 2020.
Cryptodiffer Community
Could you share what are the minimum and recommended specs to start storage mining and are GPUs required?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Any computer with CPU that supports TEE can join the mining. There’s no requirements on GPU cause we dont run zero-knowledge proof. Right now we start with Intel SGX. So most i-series and latest server series should work fine.
Cryptodiffer Community
Could you tell us a little bit about your roadmap going forward, how do you plan onboarding users and gaining more adoption for Crust Network ?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
We are doing three things on both supply and requirements sides. So on supply side, with next version of TestNet(maxwell2.0) we are going to invite miners to join and provide their storage resources. It is incentive, so we are expecting wider range of miners to join. On requirements side, we are building an cloud storage application called Crust Cloud. The very first test version based on testNet is going to be available soon within this month so that people can start experience and comment on it; also, we are compiling a solid SDK/Gateway for other clients (like tradditional cloud client, and DApp developers) to use. There are lots of requirements from DApps.
Cryptodiffer Community
How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not spoken well? Do you have local communities for them to let them better understand about your project?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Currently we are working with partners around the world to help spread our news to different regions, such as Japan, Korea, and other Asian regions. Since we want to become a global project, it is essential that we are not only focused on the english-speaking market. We will announce more partnerships over the coming weeks/months
Cryptodiffer Community
Defi On fire ,,,
Can you share #CRUST opinion on DeFi ? What steps are already being taken towards the future progress of #CRUST ?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
DeFi is definitely going to boost CRUST as well. In particular, we expect more people to start using stable coins (like USDT or other equivalent in Polkadot ecosystem) to pay for storage services. We do need an on-chain DEX-like solution to work together with, in order to support the scenario. So we are doing two things: first, enable the support for other crypto-asset to be paid for storage orders; second, calculate and make sure the storage merchant has provided enough pledge. Also, with CRU tokens be pledged or staked, we expect there could be more DeFi projects make use of that, especially considering the cross-chain features within Polkadot ecosystem.
Cryptodiffer Community
When will users stop being afraid to use decentralized cloud ?
How will Crust Network want to be a leader in the mass distribution of decentralized cloud?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
It is an issue of education. The market needs to be educated about how their data is actually more safe and private in a decentralised cloud system, as opposed to a centralised cloud. This education may take time, but we see it slowly happening, especially in the tech-advanced blockchain community.
Cryptodiffer Community
Why did you choose to build on Polkadot, what’s the competitive advantage over ETH?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
We chose between different platforms, ETH is definitely one of the options. There are two major reasons for us to choose Polkadot. First, Crust Network is a rather complicated network, we need a lot of stuff to be customizable, or programmable — Smart contract is not enough, but Polkadot’s substrate tech framework and parachain mechanism can offer that; also, we expect lots of storage orders incoming, so TPS, state exposion and gas fee can be a real issue. Second, we got lot’s of support from Polkadot systems, including Web3 foundation and Parity technologies, on technical support, funding, and marketing.
Cryptodiffer Community
Many projects exist scam lately. Why should I trust CRUST not to do the same?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
We are not a “new” project. We started 1.5 years ago. Actually if you can tell that by looking at our codebase and history on github 🙂
Cryptodiffer Community
Please tell us about your strategic ally and key partnerships? What role do these partnerships play in PlotX ‘ success?
What’s PlotX long-term development plan? How do you make users believe that PlotX is a long-term high-quality project?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
The best way to learn about Crust would be to check out some of our Medium (https://medium.com/crustnetwork) articles that explain certain aspects of the project. Crust is quite a large project with many different aspects, so service providers, businesses, personal users, token holders would all want different information. Just today we had an interview with Boxmining, so definitely check out that video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuP0AjYjGoY&ab_channel=Boxmining). If you had any specific questions, you could join our Telegram (https://t.me/CrustNetwork) and ask us.
Cryptodiffer Community
According to research, about 88 percent of cloud storage are presently unused, do you see this as a challenge in gathering adoption?
Crust supports multiple storage layer protocols. Apart from IPFS, which other layers do you support
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
That’s not a big problem. Actually there are several ways to look at it. First, there’s actually rather strong need on distributed, or “edge” side of storage which centralized cloud storage cannot provide — for example, the HD quality version of operation videos in hospital, the video record of cameras all over the place, the data is pretty big and it can never be uploaded to the centralized cloud. Secondly, even with spare space only, severs can join the Crust Network to provide additional network security — the spare spaces can be calcuated into GPoS staking quota as well, it’s just less.
For storage layer protocols, right now we support both IPFS and Fast DFS ( derived version of GFS). It can be easily extended.
Cryptodiffer Community
What is Crust NETWORK?? How big is the cloud computing market?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Cloud storage is a huge market, and continuing to grow as the world moves more and more online. Here is some interesting data about storage. Storage and computing will always be important in a technological society, and we think we can become a large participant in the decentralised cloud market.
Cryptodiffer Community
Can you list 1 or 3 killer features of #CrustNetwork that makes it ahead of its competitors ?? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about ???
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
First, hardware requirements are pretty low which is easier to spread out from mining point of view; Second, data sealing is rather fast (right now the benchmark is <60s for 32G data) so storage users get better experience; Third, more privacy protection oriented – TEE enclave grant that benefits by storing any data encypted; Lastly, closely integrated with Polkadot ecosystem – which means can be easily integrated with Web3 DApps, better governance, etc.
Cryptodiffer Community
Q: What computing methods does CRUST use to safeguard the privacy and integrity of its users’ data?
Q: What is CRUST’s approach to creating a secure cloud? What differences would there be with the one we already know? Who would have access?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Crust makes use of TEE and uses the seal algorithm inside TEE to encrypt and decrypt data. We enhanced the whole encryption process as well (like to introduce nounce and random numbers during the whole process) . Due to the protection of the hardware, the internal data and public and private keys of the TEE will not be leaked, so that even for the node owners, they cannot leak data.
The most important thing is on audit and transparency — the protocol is open source, and reviewed by everybody. Any node that joined the network will be guarded by the network, i.e. once users pass data to those nodes, they are guranteed to be stored safely according to the stroage contract, otherwise they’ll get detected and punished.
Cryptodiffer Community
How will Crust Network solve the scaling problem? And how will it overcome the threat of centralization?
How easy is it to use Crust Network in an existing infrastructure?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Zikun, who is our technical leader, recently did a session in Parity & Friends, hosted by Parity Technologies. He made an in-depth intro on our usage of OCW (offchain worker) to improve the scalability, and avoid state explosion.
For the centralization probem — we got 2 benefits to avoid that: first, as I mentioned in previous posts, the hardware requirements are pretty low and sort of anti-ASIC, so resource-wise it can hardly be centralized; secondly, GPoS is designed to be like a balance between PoS and PoW, it’s highly unlikely for somebody to dominate on both resources and tokens.
For the existing infrastruction adption — it is a very good question. Starting from recently, we are planning to create a detailed guide for miners, mostly from topology point of view, on how to join our network with a bunch of machines , or with a full-equipped data center 🙂
Cryptodiffer Community
Q1. I saw that Crust has Meaningful Proof of Work mechanism and Guaranteed Proof of Stake consensus. What is the role of each in the ecosystem and how are both complementary? Are the weaknesses of PoW and PoS covered by having these 2 consensus?
Q2. Crust offers de entralized storage not just for individuals but also for businesses. Are there different services for enterprises? Does it require a different type or account? If yes, what would be needed to create it?
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Q1: was answered in my previous posts. MPoW is offchain, and is to generate storage work reports and upload to chain. GPoS is consensus, it is to generate blocks.
Q2: it’s for both. We will compile an SDK (our wiki will definitely include the specs in near future), the SDK can be used to build applications that serves either business users or end users. Actually our Crust Cloud application will be on top that SDK as well. All the details will be released later.
Co-founder of Crust Network, Leo Wang
Thanks Maks. Thanks everyone for your questions.
$CRU will be available on Bounce tomorrow at 8PM (GMT+8).
Make sure to join our Telegram if you have any questions and to keep up to date with all of our big announcements coming over the next few days, weeks and months.
Our Telegram: https://t.me/CrustNetwork
CRU Auction Details: https://medium.com/crustnetwork/community-sealed-bid-auction-offering-c6e47ff4df94
Cryptodiffer TEAM
Thank you
For your time;)
Appreciate all the insights and great answers
Thank you everyone who joined us today!
Great questions
