This series was created to share information and education about teams building in the Polkadot ecosystem. Our guest on this edition is Crust Network. Crust is a multi-chain, decentralized cloud storage provider, which supports multiple storage-layer protocols such as IPFS, and exposes instant accessible on-chain storage functions to users. Crust Network has three main functions: NFT and Metaverse Metadata storage, personal file storage, and Website/dApp hosting.

Can you share some background on Crust Network?

Crust Network is a decentralized storage and hosting solution built on Polkadot’s Substrate framework. Crust provides an incentive and service layer for the IPFS protocol in order to offer guaranteed, immutable and decentralized file storage with full data ownership. On one hand node operators can provide their storage resources to the network and receive rewards for it, and on the other hand users can access those resources for a specific service fee.

The main use cases of Crust Network are: NFT/Metaverse Metadata storage, Decentralized Website/App Hosting (Uniswap and AAVE use Crust for this), personal File Hosting/Sharing, SocialFi content and much more. Our current target users are web3 developers or protocols, but also end-users can actually use Crust via simple WebUI (crustfiles.io).

We focus on businesses / organizations, because they have more data which they need to store than individuals. The mission of our project is to provide safe, fast, and easy-to-use decentralized cloud storage to the public.

What makes Crust unique?

What makes Crust unique is that it provides the only decentralized storage protocol which is fully native to the IPFS protocol.

Additionally, Crust is more versatile in its application scenarios than other protocols by not only providing solutions for cold storage but also for hot storage use cases. Another benefit of Crust is that it provides cross-chain storage services not just within the Polkadot ecosystem, but also for most other public chains which can all interact with Crust in the most seamless and web3-like way.

On the data level users can enjoy multiple replicas of their files stored on our nodes distributed over the entire world and assured by our protocol. This multi-replicas approach increases decentralization, redundancy, availability and performance.

How many different blockchains is Crust deployed on, and which blockchains are they?

Crust runs its own layer 1 blockchain, built on Polkadot’s Substrate framework. We also have a live Parachain on the Kusama Network, and are in the process of going live with our Polkadot Parachain as well. This makes Crust fully compatible with all projects in the Dotsama ecosystem.

However, Crust also provides its storage resources via cross-chain storage contracts to many other ecosystems. Crust i.e. is listed as a recommended solution in the official documentation of Ethereum, Polygon or Near and is accessible via many more chains such as BSC, Arbitrum, Aptos, Elrond or Flow.

As a multi-chain storage network, why did you decide to acquire a Polkadot parachain?

As one of the original projects supporting Polkadot, we wholeheartedly believe in its mission to create a fully interoperable blockchain world. We believe Polkadot will be a leading project for many years to come and therefore want to continue our partnership with them.

We chose to acquire a parachain slot for multiple reasons:

1. We believe in the Polkadot mission and vision

2. The additional security Polkadot will offer our community

3. The ability to connect with all other Polkadot projects and seamlessly offer them storage

4. The endless support we have received from the Polkadot team

5. Polkadot’s architecture allowed us to build a storage use-case specific chain to really build the best solution for web3 storage services possible

What is the utility of the $CRU token itself? Is this the same token which is used for accessing $CRU services on all of the chains it is present on?

Yes, $CRU is a utility token which is used for buying and selling storage space on the Crust Network.

The $CRU token will be used for all storage purchases except for those which occur on our Kusama parachain. To purchase storage through Kusama you must use our token $CSM. The other main use cases of $CRU are:

1. Staking to maintain the GPoS consensus of the Crust network

2. Used to guarantee the selected nodes

3. Serving as collateral for providing storage services

4. Serving as a transaction fee for using the network

5. Used to purchase resource services

6. Used for election and voting of on-chain governance mechanisms, and vote on proposals.

In your opinion, what up and coming feature or development are you most looking forward to in 2023 for Crust?

This is a secret ;) We will announce a new roadmap soon.

Why did you choose to build on Polkadot, and what feature of Polkadot’s architecture interests you the most? Where do you see Polkadot in five years?

First of all, the technical framework of Substrate is excellent, and it is very friendly to the performance and functional support of Crust, our application-specific blockchain. Off-chain Worker also well supports the implementation of the Crust storage market. Also, Crust's autonomous mechanism based on Substrate can be used to maintain the TEE solutions list. Finally, the XCMP protocol brings possibilities to Crust's cross-chain ecosystem.

Imagine that the storage service provided by Crust in the future can be purchased with multiple tokens, and any project in the ecosystem can use the storage capabilities brought by Crust. This is a combination of 1 + 1 and results greater than 2.

Lastly - is there anything else you’d like to say or resources you’d like to share?

Some network metrics (18.01.23):

• Overall storage capacity: 546,000 TB

• Number of individual nodes: 1,265

• Number of unique files stored on Crust: > 1.72 million

• Average number of replicas: 30

For everybody who wants to try out Crust services can use our decentralized “Dropbox” application: crustfiles.io

Devs and builders can find our documentation to start building here: https://wiki.crust.network/docs/en/build101

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