Many individuals believe that ultimately all of the web's services, including financial apps, social apps, and even marketplaces like Amazon, will be powered by general-purpose blockchains like Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, and Solana. On-chain storage is a crucial problem that is mostly unaddressed.
Today's general-purpose blockchains can successfully handle storage-light applications like decentralized finance (DeFi), such as social apps and marketplaces, but they cannot scale to manage these applications. Imagine a scenario where each "like" or "follow" on a decentralized app costs $1 or more in storage fees.
Sadly, such circumstance has arisen as a result of the storage limitations on all of the current general-purpose blockchains. Thus, in order for web3 social media app development to fully achieve its potential to compete with Web 2 and the current systems, new blockchain designs will be required.
In the middle of an infinite state and a finite state
Today's general-purpose blockchains were all built to serve so-called finite-state applications. These are the kind of apps where you need to retain a certain amount of data or state on hand for each user. For instance, the balance of each user's account is all you truly need to know to check transactions in a financial app.
Users may exchange money millions of times, but eventually, only one tiny integer must be recorded to represent the total amount of each user. In other words, the state you must maintain rises in proportion to the number of users rather than according to the volume of transactions.
Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of DeFi consists of finite-state applications.
What occurs if we want to view prior financial data? Applications with infinite states require exponentially more data storage as more user activities are performed. Think about a typical social networking app. By creating profiles, posting, following, and performing other similar acts, users can add a state.
The distinction is that all transactions in social apps are state-augmenting as opposed to DeFi, where all transactions are state-neutral. Instead of only a few account balances in your state, you need to be able to keep an endless amount of data with social. Even worse, high availability is required since other network users frequently query this data.
To meet the storage and indexing requirements inherent to infinite state applications, blockchains will need to be properly developed for the application at hand, such as DeSo for decentralized social. This is due to the fact that without the ability to make assumptions about the type of data that will be maintained, the costs of storing, indexing, and querying the data will skyrocket, making applications built on the chain uncompetitive.
A pointless expenditure
The cost of storing just 1 GB of the on-chain state varies greatly amongst blockchains. Importantly, these expenses are only expected to increase because general-purpose blockchains weren't designed to scale storage.
Most Web 2 apps cannot be built on today's general-purpose blockchains due to the high on-chain storage costs, even when using bridges to storage-focused blockchains like Arweave or Filecoin. At the current price range of $0.10-$1.00+, it is prohibitively expensive to store even a basic connection to Arweave or Filecoin on a general-purpose network.
Many blockchains claim to be able to execute thousands of transactions per second (TPS), although this figure does not take the application's storage needs into consideration. There is a big difference between 50,000 DeFi transactions, which might produce zero bytes of new state data, and 50,000 social transactions, which might generate tens of megabytes of data that need to be saved, indexed and searched.
When handling the latter kind of transaction, even the most advanced blockchains of today utterly fail. This restriction is preventing some of the most exciting Web 3 apps from working properly.
The difficulty of storing and indexing data in a scalable way has generally been underestimated in the cryptographic community. The huge diversity of infinite-state applications, such as social apps and marketplaces, has received very little attention in the Web 2 application industry, which has long been dominated by finite-state applications.
Web3 development company need blockchains that are specifically created to support new use cases in order to fully achieve its potential to disrupt Web 2 and the systems of the past due to the inherent storage and indexing limits of the current general-purpose chains.
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