0Chain (launched 2018) is a decentralized data storage platform, providing data privacy, protection, and private sharing. It is created on Ethereum blockchain and aims to help businesses achieve GDPR/CCPA compliance, transparency, and near-zero liability. ZCN is the native token of the platform and tied to the data stored in the system. It can also be locked or staked in order to generate interest for holders.^[1]

Company

0chain is developed by US based organization, 0chain LLC. It was founded by visionary entrepreneur, Saswata Basu and an associate professor from San Jose State University, Tom Austin in 2017. The company has a primary office at Cupertino, California, and currently has around 11-50 employees working.

Team

0chain has a world class team members that are experienced and skillful in cryptography, distributed computing and cloud infrastructure. Notable contributors include-

Fundraising

0Chain has raised a total of $5.9M USD in funding over 3 rounds so far. Their pre-seed round raised an undisclosed amount of funds on July 1, 2017. The Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and pre sale rounds held in December 2014 raised $5.9 million USD. Their latest funding was raised on Jan 21, 2020 from a .^[2][3]

Initial Coin Offering

0chain ICO raised total $39,000,000 USD in just two months. It started in December 2018 and ended on 16 Feb 16, 2018. The ZCN token was priced at 1.4 USD. 10 % ZCN token out of total supply of 400,000,000 were available for ICO round.^[3]

Overview

0Chain is a decentralized storage platform having features like high performance, private data sharing. It provides automated data privacy compliance, continuous protection, and secured sharing for user application. 0Chain has an immutable data ledger to resolve disputes, conduct audits, and eliminate data liability.^[4]

In addition, 0Chain enables secured data sharing between customers, partners, internal groups, and employees. The platform extends private data usage in smart contract applications on blockchain platforms such as Hyperledger and Ethereum with simple API interfaces and can provide such integration with any smart contract. It aims to help businesses and enterprises to get complied with GDPR/CCPA with transparency, and near-zero liability.

The 0chain protocol addresses typical issues related with proof-of-work blockchain (e.g Bitcoin) such as scalability, energy waste and also problems like data breach, data replication etc. associated with data storage protocols. It utilized various protocols in its ecosystem to achieve fast performance (scalability) and data protection. The miners have multiple ways to earn native ZCN token for providing network much needed stability and security.

0chain launched its initial release on ethereum blockchain in July 2017 and the testnet started in August 208. it is looking to release mainnet in Q1 2021.

0Chain Protocols

As mentioned in overview, 0chain makes use of various protocols and technologies to get faster transaction speed, latency and also achieve data protection with privacy.

Consensus Protocol

Traditional blockchains like bitcoin can take up to an hour to confirm the transactions at times while newer technologies have attempted to improve finalization times using different approaches. 0Chain takes a new approach to enable a fast, flexible, and free platform for dApp through their unique Proof-of-stake consensus protocol. By dividing the work among different groups, confirmation time is improved via reducing network latency. In order to achieve that, 0Chain’s network rely on three main players and gthey collectively called as 'Service Providers'. These three perform several duties that are necessary for a functional blockchain systems such as consensus, storage of blocks, and storage of data..

1. Miners: Miners run the consensus protocol and generate new transactions to the network. They accept transactions from users and build, verify, notarize, and finalize blocks based on consensus. They need to store wallet and smart contract states on their ledger to ensure submitted transactions are executed correctly.
2. Blobbers: They store required data needed for dApps. The stored data can be of any size and provide a single source of truth for that data.
3. Sharders: Sharders store the blockchain history and respond to queries about the history. They store blocks, keep records of view changes through magic blocks, and respond to queries from users. Anyone joining the network queries the sharders to determine the active members of the blockchain.

In 0chain network ,client sends the transaction to the miners, and query the sharders for status. Miners and Sharders get paid for each validated block. They miners further sub-classified into those that act solely as 'miners' and those that act as 'generators' that extend the blockchain by proposing new transactions. Using this way, the network traffic and the time for messages to be sent is reduced which increases network efficiency. The sharders and blobbers both play specialized roles as well and they are also key components of 0Chain’s architecture.

This helps everyone an opportunity to play a part as the requirements to become sharder or blobber depends on machine's data storage capability and computation power. To be more specific, machines such as a machine with high data storage capabilities for a blobber, but less computational power than a sharder may need.

0x implements a squared-staking approach to deal with users having multiple accounts and trying to flood a system. The miners and sharders are selected on the basis of an algorithm that uses the square of the number of tokens they have staked (ZCN2). This approach encourages users to stake coins from a single account and also places a greater risk of penalties if they fail to correctly run the protocol. 0Chain network creates faster finalization time because nodes can progress quickly after receiving messages and they do not need to wait until all messages have been delivered in a given round.

Storage Protocol

Storage Process Illustration
The 0Chain protocol takes a different approach compared to traditional blockchains. As mentioned above, the tasks of performing consensus, storing blocks, and data storage are divided into 3 separate entities — miners, sharders, and blobbers, respectively.

How storage process works?

On chain storage methods make a data heavy transaction resulting in delay of other transactions on the blockchain and off-chain storage methods are susceptible to hacker attacks as they are placed at one place. 0Chain provides a solution to these current problems using rapid consensus method. In this protocol, most of the storage work is allocated Blobbers, which are different group of machines than the miners and so the miners can focus on rapid consensus. The storage providers or blobbers, provide proofs that they are storing the correct contents by writing a Merkle root to the blockchain. Special signed receipts called markers ensure that the blobbers are rewarded for any storage work that they do; a challenge protocol verifies that the blobbers continue to store the data.^[3]

To validate work, blobbers provide three proofs when challenged by the miners:

1. The data being stored,
2. The relevant system metadata, and
3. The client-signed marker to prove that the correct data is being stored.

When these get validated, miners confirm that the blobbers are rewarded for their service and that the client is getting the service for which they are paying. Based on the blobber’s ability to provide the requested data, their stake is rewarded or punished accordingly via a smart contract.

Wallet Security Protocol

How split key works

The procedure to generate, maintain and manage cryptographic keys is still challenging one in wallets that are used currently to store user assets. The lack of wallet technology also adds another challenge to new users. The digital signatures are one of the most computationally intense actions on the blockchain. The users need to generate and authenticate their transactions while miners verify and validate them. Most of the users use wallets these days that require Two-factor authentication (2FA), which recently has been shown to be vulnerable to attacks and these also dependent on the uptime of the network and servers. To address these issues and provide security to the wallets, 0Chain has taken an innovative approach to key generation and management by using multiple devices. Generally, the users have more than one device at their disposal (such as a mobile device and laptop) in which their private-key can generate multiple 'split-keys' and store them in each device respectively. By splitting the key into multiple devices, the wallet achieves-

• Adequate protection even if a component of the key is lost or corrupt
• In the case of losing a device or theft, the key is protected
• Signatures must contain all the split components
• The components of signatures from each device are secure on their own and cannot be used for an attack or to expose other portions of the key.

If one of the devices is compromised, the user’s assets still remain safe and the users can easily regenerate a new set of keys using their original mnemonic seed. This split technology is included in the 0Wallet and 0Auth products.

Products

0Chain have about five different, unique products, which are: 0Chain net, 0Box, 0Wallet, 0Stor, and 0Stor Private. Most of these are in beta testing phase and can be tested on Testnet - Betanet.  0Box and 0stor private are available to use.

0ChaiNet

It is fast, secure, scalable, permission-less blockchain with dStorage option. It is built from scratch with Golang.Enterprises use 0Chain with the goal of ensuring user ownership, access, and transparency of GDPR regarding consent, data subject rights, records, and security.

0Stor

It public dStorage for Decentralized applications (dApps) and it is configurable, secure with having private sharing facility.

0Stor Private

It is private dStorage for enterprises and it is an Ideal for privacy, risk and data protection to businesses and enterprises.

0Box

0Box early look
It is a dApp running on 0Chain and it is a private cloud storage service with anonymous sharing .It doesn't not require any logins or email. It follows your key- your data method. It protects original content. It is Dropbox-style, zero-trust dCloud storage and The users can share files privately and anonymously through push notifications. The consumer has a complete and transparent view of their data on 0Box via the 0Chain Blockchain. They can keep track of uploads to their folder and downloads. It is available on Android and iOS platforms.^[7]

0Wallet and 0Auth

The cryptocurrency users can use 0Wallet to lock and stake their tokens to earn interest and service rewards. The wallet uses split-key protocol to ensure that assets are safe and easy to use, compared to hardware devices. 0Auth is an application using which the user can enable 2DA for the wallet.^[5]

ZCN is tied to the data and is used for storage. The value of ZCN is based on data stored on the network, initially driven by 0Box, and later by developers and enterprises. Developers use 0Chain dStorage via SDK to protect customer data and provide privacy compliance at a low cost and high performance.^[8]

Development

0Chain blockchain and other products are in testnet phase and the mainnet is expected to release soon in Q1 2021.

Testnet

Betanet Tutorial
The testnet was first announced in August 2018 and currently 'Betanet' phase is going on. Anyone can participate in it and the interested user can go to testnet portal - https://one.devnet-0chain.net/ and create a 0wallet and also need to get test ZCN tokes from faucet there in order to test the various functions. Once they receive test ZCN, they can carry out wallet functions like send/receive, locking/unlocking. staking/unstaking tokens. The storage platform functions are available to test. The users can create/update allocation, lock read/write tokens, read/write pools. The users can also upload file and share with others. All the transactions and stars related to blobbers, miners, and sharders can also be observed on the testnet portal.^[3]

Mainnet

The mainnet is named 'Fuji' after an iconic mountain in Japan, Mount Fuji. Mainnet was announced in November 2020 with looking for involvement from the community. The development team released Fuji Miner & Sharder registration program in February 2021. For the launch of 0Chain’s Mainnet, there will be 100 Miners, 25 Sharders, and an uncapped number of Blobbers (there is no upper-bound limit for Blobbers on 0Chain). The group of 125 Miners and Sharders is known as the Active Set.^[1]

Tokenomics

0chain has a native token denoted by ticker symbol ZCN. It is an ERC20 Token created on Ethereum blockchain by deploying smart contract. It has maximum and total supply(pre-mined) 400,000,000 ZCN and 200,000,000 ZCN respectively. It registered all time high of $1.26 USD on Jan 27, 2021 and all time low of $0.01639 Jan 26, 2020.^[3]

When 0Chain mainnet launches, the ZCN token holders will be allowed to swap their tokens for the mainnet token. According to whitepaper, the ZCN mainanet tokens will be able to perform super fast transactions with 1 second steady-state finality and It can scale to infinite transactions per second (theoretically) on multiple parallel chains without impacting performance. ZCN can be used to receive services for “free” as the token when locked on the network. 0ChainNet offers innovative token economics which enables users and developers to get “free” services, such as transactions and storage. Users can lock ZCN tokens collects upfront interest.

Token Distribution

The 50% max supply i.e, 200 million tokens are pre-mined and these will be distributed as follows

.

Token Vesting

The pre-sale tokens were distributed in June 2018 and are in current circulation. All team and seed tokens are vested over four years from January 2018. About 40M team tokens will be locked to preserve integrity of the network for a few years. Since the network is capped at 400 million tokens, the miners and sharders are expected to increase their fees to compensate for their work and continue to foster the ecosystem long after the total supply (200 Million) is exhausted.

Partnerships

0chain has partnered with many interesting blockchain projects such as Kylin Network, Ocean Protocol and Coinvise. These partnership will help 0chain to grow its ecosystem.

According to the announcement, Ocean Market will use 0Chain’s Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE) technology to enable Ocean Market users to publish their data in a trustless fashion without having to run additional software. The PRE technology allows each user’s Ethereum wallet to safely share data asset urls (private data) with a 3rd party through a token that provides information about the location of the url and a re-encryption key that the 3rd party can use to decrypt the received url. Ocean protocol allows users to store data on any storage platform, including 0Chain, and so the integration of 0Chain’s storage technology will further boosts the utility of the Ocean Market and also 0chain as well.^[3]

Kylin Network is building cross-chain platform to power Polkadot ecosystem and using 0Chain's PRE technology, it will allow data owners to share their data privately with other users on Kylin’s marketplace in exchange for fees. Additionally, it will become convenient for data owners to store data on our network and abide by compliance (GDPR, CCPA) with decentralization, as well as provide high performance and localization.^[4]

0Chain’s customizable data storage solution will enable Coinvise users to leverage on censor-free, privacy platform to store data and connect with their community members. 0chain has teamed up with Coinvise to incentivize developers to build on the 0Chain network. The App Developers can earn rewards for building apps for various use cases, 0Chain is offering 5,000 ZCN for the developers whose product is released using 0Chain dStorage and 2,000 ZCN Reward for the referral of quality projects.^[1]