Key Takeaways:
- Machina, the World’s First Proof-of-Stake Storage Solution is Now Available on NEAR
- The Machina storage network is expected to go live in Q4 2022.
Machina is a sharded data storage structure that is aimed to offer on-chain information that is scalable, cost-effective, and quickly retrievable. Machina uses NEAR’s Nightshade sharding characteristics to create a seamless economic architecture based on stablecoins.
It has a shared data storage project developed in partnership with NEAR Aurora, and the online security protocol HAPI is now available on NEAR. The Machina team, which was awarded a grant from the NEAR Foundation, chose NEAR due to its ease of writing code and deploying/testing Smart Contracts and its carbon-neutral, proof-of-stake blockchain.
File-based storage will be used, saving every transaction therein directly, eliminating the requirement for the runtime to initiate data retrieval or uploading. Furthermore, the platform makes on-chain data and all of blockchain’s security features like consensus and decentralization available on-chain. This will contribute to the emergence of a new age of smart contract development.
Machina can be utilized by both NEAR applications — with the support of EVMs like Aurora — and Solidity-based Smart Contracts on Ethereum by providing a stable, quickly retrievable, and always-online on-chain storage solution. Furthermore, Machina allows dapp teams to query and get data without making off-chain requests, implying that Web 3 now has a new tool for mass adoption.
Machina uses File Fingerprinting to reduce time, energy, and computational overhead by mapping data and to assign a unique identifier to each dataset. However, this means that each validator will need to approve or refute the data’s integrity based on a short text string. The fingerprint is then validated by consensus, depending on the agreement achieved.
“Sharding on NEAR is critical for establishing a new standard for on-chain immutable storage,” explains Hapi CEO Dona Mara. “Within the NEAR Blockchain, Machina functions as a distinct shard.”
Machina will not have arbitrary Turing-complete computations since it will not use smart contracts. The Machina storage network is expected to go live in Q4 2022.
It employs the unique sharding capabilities of NEAR’s Nightshade to scale up the data stored proportionally to the number of validators joining the network, resulting in scalable, cost-effective, and quickly retrievable information on-chain. Furthermore, entities that use Machina’s storage are not bound to any particular payment type currency or asset. Instead, the cost of storage is subtracted in stablecoins!
