Introduction

Lighthouse is now bringing decentralized storage to the entire Ocean Protocol Ecosystem. Using Lighthouse — Ocean data publishers, marketplaces, and dapps will now have access to storing data on the Filecoin network leading to net positive value generation due to the low storage cost across thousands of active miners in the filecoin economy.

Ocean Protocol for the new data economy

Data is the essential resource of modern times and is the new oil. However, unlike oil, which burns and exhausts, data sharing and usage lead to more innovation and a better digital society.

Blockchain technology has enabled a new data economy which is Ocean Protocol. Ocean Protocol bridges the gap between data supply and demand, allowing data availability for the researchers and providing a fair share of revenue to the data owners. Especially in the current market scenario, we have seen companies exert tight control over data and not let anybody outside access it.

Hence, this led to closed-source ChatGPT models at OpenAI and the recent acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft, leading to AI models being controlled and developed by just a few, due to restricted access to data.

Lighthouse — perpetual storage on Filecoin

Lighthouse is a perpetual storage protocol built on Filecoin that allows storing your data long-term with a one-time fee. In addition, Lighthouse Storage provides encryption and access control functionality to store private data and create token-gated access to resources. Along with fast gateways to stream 4k videos through its IPFS Gateways, Lighthouse Storage is the feature-rich way to use IPFS and Filecoin.

Decentralized Backend Storage

Ocean Protocol provides the ability to share data through its app-level interface, like ocean marketplaces and middleware, to compute over data using a privacy-preserving method, i.e., using data without it leaving the premise of the data owners. Data owners can also keep data with a trustful entity like Ocean Protocol Foundation — a non-profit organization.

Given the presence of web3 storage systems like Filecoin, there is a demand from the Ocean Protocol ecosystem to store data there. Hence, with the support of the Ocean Protocol team, Lighthouse Storage is chosen for the integration from the Ocean Economy to Filecoin via the Decentralized Backend Storage (DBS) created by the Ocean Protocol team.

This backend (DBS) provides the following functionality

• allow users to upload content

• handle payments

• push the content to decentralized storage using Lighthouse Storage

• return the storage object to be used in the DDO

• Hence, the aim is to improve UX for the data publishers on the Ocean Protocol and provide them with ways to store their data on a decentralized network.

Filecoin microservice by Lighthouse Storage registers itself to DBS, using the Register endpoint every 10 minutes per the DBS Spec. The microservice exposes the following API Endpoints:

• GetQuote — Gets a quote to store some files

• Upload — Upload some files

• GetStatus — Gets status for a job

• GetLink — Gets DDO files object for a job

Summary

Lighthouse Storage is now integrated into the Ocean Protocol, which has led to an important piece being attached to the data economy puzzle. The Lighthouse team will continue supporting the Ocean dapps, data publishers, and marketplaces to store data on web3.