**This article only represents the opinions of author to Foggie and IPFS. The content here is for informational purposes only. Please consult the original article's author for any questions.




As the most famous project in the decentralized storage industry, IPFS is now in its fifth year of development. After creating a market fever in 2020, its incentive layer Filecoin has lost a certain amount of luste. With the rapid development of Web3, many have found that IPFS has a few key limitations.

The first problem is access speed. It can take IPFS more than 1 minute to load a picture, which is quite unacceptable for Internet users who are used to fast information access. The reason is that every time IPFS makes a query, a node has to send a request message to its neighboring nodes and search for information from one node to another. This means that all the nodes must remain active. Even if only a small number of nodes are offline or remain silent, it will still directly slow down the query speed of the whole network.

It's difficult to keep all the nodes active. Even with FIL incentives, it's still almost impossible to do so. To solve this problem, it is essential to enhance the fault tolerance of the decentralized storage system.

The second problem is availability. If the data queried by a user does not exist, the IPFS system search the whole network for the data, thus consuming a lot of time and generating a lot of network communication. As a result, a potential vulnerability of the IPFS system is to request non-existent data. The system will encounter congestion and waste network resources.

To address the limitations of IPFS, a new technology called CYFS has come into being. CYFS abandons the "node by node" search method and adopts an Owner Online Device (OOD) network model instead.

Users store their important data on their own OODs. Users then privately and securely back up their data on others' OODs via the Datamall Chain decentralized storage exchange. In this way, they can make their data disaster proof. Users can also share idle storage space in exchange for DMC tokens. When all users maintain their OODs, not only their own data will be protected — other users' data will be protected as well. Proactively maintaining the network of OODs becomes in everyone's best interests.

Using CYFS, all backed-up information can be quickly and accurately located. Every time a user backs up information, a unique link will be generated. This link consists of a Zone ID and an Object ID. Through the Zone ID, one can know exactly which node contains the information, and then apply to the node to access the information according to the Object ID.

Even if an individual OOD is down (or multiple OODs are down), users can still quickly use the links to access backed-up copies of the file. Tests show that it only takes 10 seconds to obtain data on the CYFS network, which is 1/7 of the time needed on the IPFS system.

CYFS is a next-generation Web3 protocol, and the OOD network model it uses is the next-generation decentralized storage model. To use the CYFS network, one must have an OOD device or service first. For this, my top recommendation is Foggie, a virtual device launched by Fog Works.

Fog Works is a Web3 device and application company funded by Draper Dragon Fund, OKX Blockdream Ventures and Lingfeng Capital. Foggie is a Web3 virtual device that allows users to store and back-up their data, share their data, download apps, and mine crypto rewards. Specifically:

Storage: Pictures and videos are can be stored on your Foggie, and then can be backed-up in a completely decentralized way on other Foggies (rather than on a third-party cloud), protecting user privacy and preventing catastrophic data loss.

Sharing: Content owners can share their files via public or semi-private URLs. Because CYFS doesn't rely on TCP/IP, DNS, or TCP/IP, these URLs become unblockable/uncensorable. Foggie can automatically detect high-demand content and copy those files to other Foggies to improve the availability and speed of content delivery, and call the latest backup node rather than the original node to reduce the network pressure on the original node.

IFPS Compatibility: Foggie can speed up content stored on IPFS. Just input the IPFS URL into Foggie, and Foggie can double as an IPFS pinning service.

Mining: Foggie owners can share their spare storage space through the Datamall Chain market to obtain DMC token rewards.

Decentralized storage is not a flash-in-the-pan industry. It requires long-term optimization to provide sufficient support for the fast-developing Web3, to constantly turn Web2 to Web3, and to achieve full decentralization, data security, and privacy protection. Let's look forward to the official launch of Foggie, and I will continue to follow up with Foggie's product performance and technological innovation.