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Since its debut, Phala has been appearing in the public eye as a corner of Polkadots ecological privacy sector. In fact, the Phala network also attaches great importance to the application of decentralized storage technology.As early as May 28 this year, Phala CEO Tong Lin and Crust Network, the head project of the Polkadot storage sector, jointly establishedwas discussed. Both Phala and Crust are based on TEE to realize the secrecy of the network and functions, and both miner nodes have the requirement of supporting SGX equipment. The Phala network needs to combine decentralized storage technology to cache the data that needs to be processed, while Crust needs confidentiality technology to ensure that user data is not wrongly stored or leaked. In theory, Phala and Crust networks will complement and complement each other in the Web3 world.
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Why does Phala need miners
The means of implementing Phala network confidentiality - TEE, Trusted Execution Environment - is actually very common in todays society. The commands executed in TEE cannot be tampered with by external software and operating system, and only output the results of data analysis. This technology has been widely used in fingerprint unlocking and face unlocking on mobile phones. After the mobile phone enters the face and fingerprint information, it is sent to the TEE of the mobile phone for verification, and the TEE of the mobile phone compares the information. If the information is consistent, it will output a can be unlocked command. , the phone will be unlocked.
This is equivalent to black boxing the collection and analysis process in the traditional process - since the collection and handling of source data is inevitable, it may as well be handed over to an absolutely reliable, unknown and non-interfering third party, which is also from the results It guarantees the fairness and credibility of everyone (source data party, conclusion demander). However, although a single TEE is confidential, information cannot be exchanged. For example, how to analyze the sex ratio of everyones fingerprints without collecting and keeping everyones fingerprints?
This requires a network that can connect multiple source data providers and send a fingerprinting information request to all of them, asking for their consent and fingerprinting gender information.
Different from the traditional centralized analysis, the analysis will be completed and output directly on the device of the source data provider.
The Phala network does not receive anyones fingerprint information, only the feedback of thousands of TEEs: male, or female.
Each new miner is a node that can perform parallel operations. In this way, Phalas network performance will increase exponentially with the increase in the number of miners.
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How Phala applies decentralized storage technology
In traditional logic, once data is collected, it means the transfer of data sovereignty. In many UGC (User Generated Content) platforms such as Wei x, Dou x, and Xiao xshu, the user agreement inevitably mentions:
The content you upload, publish or transmit on this site and related services (including but not limited to text, images, audio, video, live broadcast content and other forms of content, as well as music, sound, lines, visual design, dialogue, etc. all components), you grant to Company and its Affiliates, Controlling Company, Successor Company a worldwide, gratuitous, non-exclusive, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) right (including but not limited to reproduction rights, translation rights, Compilation rights, information network dissemination rights, adaptation rights and rights to produce derivatives, performances and displays, etc.), the scope of use of the above rights includes but is not limited to current or other websites, applications, products or terminal equipment.
Platforms that rely on recommendation algorithms for heavy advertising operations, such as Dou x and Today x, emphasize in their privacy policies:
Similar technologies such as cookies and device information identification are technologies commonly used on the Internet. … We may use such technologies to understand your preferences and usage habits, and conduct data analysis to improve product services, recommend information or functions that users are interested in, and optimize your selection of advertisements.
This means that once we click Agree, whether it is our own information or the information we generate, it will be collected, analyzed, shared, and transmitted to purposes beyond our control and third parties. The only completely controllable method is to uninstall, but this means breaking away from this era-the Internet era has forced users to agree or even get used to that production materials should be handed in voluntarily and continuously.W3ANow, we have a choice. Application of TEE network and decentralized storage network technology
The emergence of the acquisition and transfer process has become limited and controllable.
Different from the traditional paradigm, in Phalas decentralized data analysis platform W3A, user data will not be controlled by Phala, but will be uploaded and stored to a decentralized storage network similar to IPFS. Every collection and use is subject to your consent, and you will earn money for each of your consents.
Specifically, the flow of data will be split into the following parts in W3A:
Collection: Collect data and store it in a decentralized storage service, with end-to-end encryption throughout.
Escrow: Users can manage, authorize, and delete data through confidentiality contracts.
Transaction: Provide a transaction market, users can list data by themselves, so as to earn profits.
Analysis: The demand side only purchases the right to use the data. After the demander writes the purpose and analysis algorithm, W3A will perform the analysis according to the algorithm after obtaining the authorization of the source data, and finally only output the result.
Management of private data must be trustless. As long as someone touches the plaintext data, there is a risk of leakage, so data management should not be handed over to a centralized organization. —— Phala W3A Product Documentation
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Phala and Proof of Storage Mining
Take the cooperation between Phala and Crust as an example: both protocols are Polkadot parallel chains, both projects use TEE technology, and both project economic models have mining models. Most importantly, the two projects are very complementary: Phala Network is responsible for private computing of data, and Crust is responsible for data storage of these data feeds.
Therefore, under the market demand of SGX CPU equipment, the two protocols need to jointly create a privacy technology mining ecology. Miners with Intel SGX equipment can mine Phala, Crust or other storage projects in parallel after connecting the hard disk.
Crust uses TEE for MPoW (Meaningful Proof of Work) mining to solve the problems of supervision and quantification. In Crust, TEE acts like an honest watchdog. Periodically check whether the node is working normally, and whether there is any error or leakage of user data. Through the GPoS consensus, Crust realizes efficient node incentives.
And Phalas TEE mining mechanism, we call it like PoW. The real PoW is to motivate the computing power of the computer. If the online time is long and the computing tasks are many, the rewards will be large, but it is easy to cause waste of electricity and computing power. Proof of storage mining can take advantage of the redundant resources of computing power mining, and Phala mining’s requirements for the number of CPUs and threads can also allow the miner node to better perform storage mining.
