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Codex is a decentralized data storage platform that provides exceptionally strong censorship resistance and durability guarantees. It serves as the storage branch of the Logos tech stack. Alongside the computational branch, Nomos, and the communications branch, Waku, it is one of the Logos Collective's foundational projects.
Motive
The remote storage landscape is dominated by an increasingly small number of internet powerhouses—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. While these services score highly in terms of user experience and convenience, centralized cloud data storage suffers from the following drawbacks:
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Censorship
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Lack of data ownership
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Breaches and outages
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High costs
Centralized cloud storage providers have an established history of censoring data and, as de facto owners of said data, have the power to do so according to their own standards. Furthermore, centralized platforms have fallen victim to major data breaches and service outages on numerous occasions.
Such incidents have created a gap in the market for a decentralized, censorship-resistant alternative. Existing peer-to-peer storage and file-sharing networks address some of these issues—such as robustness in the face of network disruptions and desirable resistance to censorship. Yet without adequate incentives and strong data durability guarantees, they make for unsuitable foundations upon which to build truly unstoppable applications.
Existing decentralized storage solutions purport to improve upon early P2P file-sharing platforms like eDonkey and Gnutella. However, the market still lacks a decentralized storage solution that is efficient in terms of storage and bandwidth usage while offering performance and durability guarantees comparable to incumbents.
Decentralizing data storage
Codex arises from this need for a durable, decentralized storage layer for the web3 tech stack. Such a platform's importance to the decentralized web has long been understood.
Originally, Ethereum was designed to be the execution layer of what is often referred to as the "Holy Trinity of the Decentralized Web." Alongside Ethereum were decentralized messaging and storage layers Whisper and Swarm, respectively.
Although Swarm still exists today, its development took a different path than that originally proposed, shifting its priorities to a different set of problems. This led to it being dropped as a viable data storage solution for Ethereum.
Enter Codex
The problem of durable, unstoppable data storage remains, prompting the formation of Codex in 2020. The name "Codex" refers to an ancient form of book—an allusion to the data storage engine's extremely robust—99.999999999%—durability guarantees.
Codex was announced as a core Logos Collective protocol in June 2023.