- 9 Showcases: Decentralized Storage
- 10 Showcases: New Ways of Digital Publishing
- 11 Showcases: User-Generated Content
- 12 Showcases: Personal Data Market
- 13 From Showcases to Real Production
The goal of the BNB Greenfield platform is to unleash the power of decentralized blockchain and storage technology on data ownership and data economy.
This part of the whitepaper is neither accurate as industrial designs nor serious as academic research. It just lists a few potential showcases that can be modeled upon BNB Greenfield in a “laboratory environment”. The showcases are used to inspire further experimentation and solid design to create the next generation of decentralized applications.
BNB Greenfield should first be a convenient, decentralized storage infrastructure with decent service quality.
Since BNB Greenfield provides APIs and concepts that are very similar to AWS S3, it is not hard for users to deploy their websites easily onto it and manage convenient billing via BNB.
With a sophisticated client application, users can also create their own network drive with their addresses. They can upload and download their files, photos, and videos via their desktop and mobile devices and categorize these data with different buckets. The data can be encrypted with their private keys and restricted access to themselves only.
A good feature of Greenfield as cloud storage is that it allows community-sponsored data storage. The data owner can put an object public, while other users can sponsor the storage and download bandwidth as they wish. This is not something that can be easily done with the current centralized cloud providers. Open-source software mirrors can be set up on Greenfield. Websites for social good can be run more easily.
The data availability layer is a hot topic in 2022 for a few reasons:
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Layer 1 data, both block data, and state data has accumulated too much;
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Layer 2 rollup solutions require low-cost, trustless, or close to trustless storage for the rollup data;
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modularized blockchains hope a standalone data layer can scale the total capacity up.
BNB Chain ecosystem, especially BSC itself, is particularly interested in the #1 and #2. Among all public general blockchains, BSC is the largest computing blockchain in terms of state data, unique addresses, smart contracts, total transactions, and daily active users. The total historic data of BSC was already more than several dozen terabytes in 2022. Among all these data, some are stale, dead, or dormant. They will never be used or only be used in rare cases. They should not always take up space together with other active data or bring in performance pressure.
Similar to modern PC operating systems, such stale data should be swapped out to long-term and cheaper storage, such as Greenfield. Special transactions, EVM opCode, and corresponding economics can be introduced to achieve the consensus to swap these data out. When any user or smart contract wants to operate on these swap-out data, an error of "page fault" will be triggered and users should explicitly swap in the data from Greenfield back to BSC. These ideas are being considered by BSC Core Dev already.
Similar to Ethereum, BSC also welcomes Layer 2 Rollups as the solution to scale the total computing power and ledger size. Storing data on BSC is cheaper than Ethereum, but it can be much more effective if there is a common storage infrastructure that is reliable and verifiable. Such infrastructure and corresponding data availability layer management can significantly reduce the cost of the rollups.
Data storage for the long term was not a topic that was seriously considered when blockchain was invented. However, it has become a problem today. Most developers prefer to run a blockchain node from a snapshot, instead of running for months from the genesis. Many networks, including Ethereum, have been researching that the block and historic data that has existed for more than a certain time should be allowed to drop. The community needs a publicly accessible and credible data source to read these very old data and recent snapshots. BNB Greenfield can be a good option. Its sponsorship feature is natural for this data of social good.
Digital publishing is a mature industry now. E-books, games, music, long video streaming, and short clips are all very common and widely accepted by mainstream authors and consumers.
The below two examples show how the BNB Greenfield ecosystem can help this sector.
Without mentioning Professional publishing, even some amateur publishing can be very formal and cumbersome. For some grass-root creators or authors, their works are long-tail in the eyes of traditional or even internet-based publishers and not worth covering.
With Greenfield and BSC, any amateur authors can store their works on Greenfield and mirror them onto BSC. They can sell the works on a market on BSC, and the market can automatically grant the read permissions to the buyer addresses after they pay. The authors do not need to talk with any publisher, but only perform a few clicks on the dApp and manage their (small) community.
This is very similar to the digital publishing market. But it extends to any type of data besides digital arts, such as historical statistics for certain domains, any scientific experiment data, etc.
With Greenfield, some NFT-based markets on BSC can become an "Ebay" of data.
The current design of Greenfield has no anti-piracy purpose with it at all. Once the address gets the read permission, they can download the data and circulate it to anyone for profit or for non-profit if they do not obey the rules. Some of the DRM mechanisms can still work, but many will not.
However, as a public and decentralized infrastructure, it naturally provides an auditable history for the data, with content, signature, timestamps, and checksums. It helps a lot to provide evidence for the copyright dispute.
Authors, publishers, and dApps should be aware of these limitations and choose to use them at their own risk for now. More copyright-related features may be introduced to Greenfield with the help of the community.
There is one job that benefits the most from the development of Social Media: Key Opinion Leaders, a.k.a KOLs. They publish opinions, articles, videos, and music works that please, influence and inspire people. KOLs create their own fandom and can make their fortune by using the attention and traffic of their fans.
However, there is an Achilles' heel for these KoLs: they cannot own their data and fan relationship if the platforms do not allow them to. We all know that you cannot change this, even if you are the president of the most powerful country in the world.
BNB Greenfield provides a convenient infrastructure to make the data fully owned by the creators. Meanwhile, dApps can still use such data, publish it to the public audience and maintain the social network. What is more, even the fandom relationship or social network graph can be saved on Greenfield as a type of data owned by the users. There is no single firm here that can block data access. The dApps just provide convenient UIs and toolings to facilitate information creation and propagation.
Another big advantage of Greenfield is that it makes it easy to create private fandoms by using the group features. For example, a KOL can create a special group for a special fandom. This group can be only operated by a smart contract on BSC and only allow addresses to join based on special credentials, such as holding a certain token or paying a subscription fee. These are all easy to implement with Greenfield.
Token Curated Registries were widely discussed and researched in 2018. But it didn't gain much recognition in the real use cases. One of the reasons may be that it is difficult and expensive to save the different lists and credibly present them.
BNB Greenfield provides a perfect solution for token-curated lists. A smart contract on BSC can bear the full governance and incentive logic of the registration, and meanwhile owns the rights to create objects of each list under the designated bucket for the business. The list of objects and fully tracked change history are priceless functions for such decentralized voting and governance ideas.
This may be the most complicated problem to tackle nowadays: how to own your data, such as page views, registrations, clicks, behavior data, and much more. The ownership guarantees that no platforms (usually the monopoly ones) can abuse using it. Many laws are defined to punish misuse, but there are few proactive solutions.
BNB Greenfield poses for pioneering new angles to solve this: what if you can ask the applications to store all your data encrypted on Greenfield under your account, and only allow the processing of your data via a publicly readable code?
Let us check a specific scenario. A data market stores your past buy and sell orders on Greenfield, encrypted by your account's public key. Only your private key can decrypt and read it. However the data market application will like to read your data to recommend other items, meanwhile, another data agency would like to use this data to perform commercial research. Both of them are willing to pay you for their processing of your data. You tend to grant permission to them to read the data but worry they will do other things with your data. How can BNB Greenfield solve this?
This may not be day 1 implementation but BNB Greenfield targets to solve this trust computing problem by providing a verifiable computing runtime ("do not trust, verify").
In the above scenario, the data market application and the data agency may put the programs that need to read the users' data on Greenfield and share them with you or even the whole public. You can verify whether you are comfortable with what the programs do. Then you grant the read permission of this new object with a "group-oriented" encryption scheme to these programs. The data market and the data agency can pay you and then will run these programs to get the result on a verifiable sandbox of the runtime of Greenfield.
Once this model gets understood, a lot of enhancements can be done via modern cryptography to improve the user experience.
For example, the deal can be negotiated beforehand between you and the data market. Thus the grant of the permission and corresponding economic benefits exchange can happen within a smart contract to reduce the trust required. After the deal is achieved, the data will be saved via BLS-based encryption from the time it is generated. Either the data owner or the data market programs that the data owner approves (not the data market owner) can, and only those two can decrypt the data.
Many more infrastructures related to the scenario above are not considered in this paper yet but can be gradually designed and implemented on BNB Greenfield.
Different big and small showcases are discussed above as Part 2 of the paper. Some of them may be worth to be implemented into a real application, but more are expected to inspire new models to be invented to unleash the power of BNB Greenfield. This part of the paper is expected to be soon substituted by real applications in production.