Blockchain has revolutionized decentralized finance, and with smart-contracts has enabled the world of Non-Fungible Tokens, set to revolutionize industries such as art, collectibles and gaming.
At the very core, blockchains are distributed chained hashes. They can be leveraged to store information in a decentralized, secure, encrypted, durable and available format. However, some of the challenges in Blockchain stem from the bloat of storage. Since each participating node will keep a copy of the entire chain, the same data gets replicated on each node, and even a 5MB file stored on the chain can exhaust systems.

In this session, Tejas will compare and contrast different blockchain implementations such as Storj, IPFS, YottaChain, and ILCOIN that allow data storage on the chain. Some techniques leveraged by these projects are to store the data off-chain and store the transactions metadata on the blockchain, enable multi-level blockchains, or use deduplication after encryption to reduce footprint.

Compared to traditional cloud storage, these alternatives provide decentralization, security, and cost benefits to organizations such as Netflix, Box, etc.