Storage: Litheum Depot

**Future Work**

Building a storage system in a decentralized way is both a litmus test for the web3 Industry to demonstrate its capability as storage is a fairly simple and universally needed use case, however it is also proven to be difficult to implement in a way which can balance the needs of all the actors in the system including the service providers, the service consumers, and the end-users.

We believe that different every storage use cases need different solutions. Your balance of Litheum should be stored on the Truly Decentralized and highly robuse base layer, however we don't need the CSS for our blog stored in the same way. Additionally there may be middle ground for mission critical data which needs to be robustly stored and cannot suffer any downtime but which doesn't need to be stored on the base layer.

There are multiple ways to consider using Litheum and Proof of Performance as part of a storage solution.

The first and most simple is to simply use the base layer, Litheum itself, for storage.

A second solution which may be simple and robust is a blockchain like a system which uses Litheum for its economics, Proof of Performance for its network incentives, and an additional Arweave-inspired rule added to the consensus rules to guarantee storage and availability of historical data. However it's important to note that this system would provide much better performance than are we've as the weave only provides need for data to be validated but doesn't provide a means for that historical data to be provided to end users and other nodes in the network.

I'm more flexible yet complex solution may involve uptime guarantees via collateralized services providers built with a game similar to Filecoin. Again the economic game itself would leverage the LTH token and the base Litheum layer for economic relationships between actors in this system.