Why are Incentive Mechanisms important?

In the web3 ecosystem, incentive mechanisms are the heart of blockchain technology, which helps sustain network operations and ensure the integrity of distributed ledgers.

By offering rewards to participants who contribute computing power and maintain the network by mining or validating transactions, a blockchain system ensures active participation from the users which helps in ensuring system security and sustainability.

Now let's dive into the incentive mechanisms of 0g Storage...

Proof of Random Access(PoRA)

The ZeroGravity network adopts a Proof of Random Access (PoRA) mechanism to incentivize miners to store data. It requires the miners to answer random queries to archived data chunks through which the PoRA mechanism establishes the relation between mining proof generation power and data storage.

In layman's terms, a PoRA iteration consists of

1. Computing stage: The miner computes a random recall position based on a random nonce and a mining status read from the host chain

2. Loading stage: The miner loads the archived data chunks at the given recall position, and computes the output digest by hashing the tuple of mining status and the data chunks.

If the output is as per the target, then he/she can construct a legitimate PoRA.

Storage Pricing

The cost of each 0G Storage request has two parts:

• The fee that is paid to host validators/miners for invoking the contract to process storage requests and add new data entries into the log.

• Storage endowment which supports the reward to miners who serve the corresponding data.

Mining Reward

The pricing segment is associated with an Endowment Pool and a Reward Pool. The Endowment Pool collects the storage endowments of all the data chunks belonging to this pricing segment and releases a fixed ratio of balance to the Reward Pool every second. The rate of reward release is set to 4% per year.

The mining reward consists of two parts:

• Base reward: It is paid for every accepted mining proof which decreases over time

• Storage reward: It is the perpetual reward for storing data. When a PoRA falls in a pricing segment, half of the balance in its Reward Pool is claimed as the storage reward.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, think of incentive mechanisms as the secret sauce that keeps decentralized systems like 0G Storage spicy in the web3 world!

References:

For further information about 0G Labs and the 0G Storage system, please visit the official website and explore the documentation and resources available:

• Website: https://0g.ai/

• Documentation: https://0glabs.gitbook.io/0g-doc