Many people think that general-purpose blockchains like Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, and Solana will eventually power all of the web's services, including financial apps, social apps, and even markets like Amazon. On-chain storage is a significant issue that is largely unresolved.
Today's general-purpose blockchains can operate storage-light applications, such as social apps and marketplaces, and decentralized finance (DeFi), but they are unable to scale to handle these applications. Consider a scenario where storage fees for each "like" or "follow" on a decentralized app cost $1 or more.
Unfortunately, this situation has developed as a result of storage restrictions on all of the current general-purpose blockchains. New blockchain designs will therefore be necessary for web3 social media app development to completely realize its potential and compete with Web 2 and the existing systems.
Between a finite state and an infinite state
The goal of all current general-purpose blockchains is to support so-called finite-state applications. These are the kind of apps where you have to have a specific amount of user-specific information or states on hand. For instance, all you actually need to examine transactions in a financial app is the balance of each user's account.
Users can exchange money an infinite number of times, but eventually the total amount of each user can be represented by just one little integer. In other words, rather than increasing in direct proportion to the number of users, the condition you must preserve does so in direct proportion to the number of users.
Perhaps surprisingly, finite-state applications make up the majority of DeFi.
What happens when we wish to see historical financial data? As more user actions are taken, applications with infinite states demand exponentially more storage. Consider a standard social networking app. Users can add a state by making profiles, publishing, following, and carrying out similar actions.
In contrast to DeFi, where all transactions are state-neutral, social apps only allow state-augmenting transactions. You need to be able to store an infinite quantity of data with social in place of only a few account balances in your state. Even worse, since other network users often query this data, high availability is necessary.
Blockchains will need to be appropriately created for the application at hand, such as DeSo for decentralized social, in order to meet the storage and indexing requirements inherent to infinite state applications. This is because the costs of storing, indexing, and querying the data will soar without the capacity to make assumptions about the type of data that will be preserved, rendering applications built on the chain uncompetitive.
An unnecessary expense
Each blockchain has a different cost for storing merely 1 GB of the on-chain state. Importantly, because general-purpose blockchains weren't made to scale storage, these costs are only predicted to rise.
Even when employing bridges to storage-focused blockchains like Arweave or Filecoin, the majority of Web 2 apps cannot be developed on today's general-purpose blockchains due to the high on-chain storage costs. It is too expensive to store even a fundamental link to Arweave or Filecoin on a general-purpose network at the current price range of $0.10-$1.00+.
Many blockchains assert that they can process thousands of transactions per second (TPS), although this number does not account for the application's storage requirements. Between 50,000 DeFi transactions, which can result in zero bytes of new state data, and 50,000 social transactions, which could result in tens of megabytes of data that must be recorded, indexed, and searched, there is a significant difference.
Even the most sophisticated blockchains of today completely fail when dealing with the latter type of transaction. Some of the most intriguing Web 3 apps can't function correctly because of this restriction.
The cryptographic community has often overestimated the challenges of scalable data storage and indexing. The Web 2 application sector, which has long been dominated by finite-state applications, has paid very little attention to the enormous range of infinite-state applications, such as social apps and marketplaces.
Due to the inherent storage and indexing limitations of the current general-purpose chains, Web3 development company will need blockchains that are especially designed to enable new use cases in order to fully realize its potential to disrupt Web 2 and the systems of the past.

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