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How to Address Storage Issues for Metaverse? Blockchains and Distributed File Systems

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Abstract

Constructing globally distributed file systems (DFS) has received great attention. Traditional peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed file systems have inevitable drawbacks such as instability and lacking auditing and incentive mechanisms. Thus, Inter-Planetary File Systems (IPFS) and Swarm, as the representative DFSs which integrate with blockchain technologies, are proposed and becoming a new generation of distributed file systems. Although the blockchain-based DFS successfully provides adequate incentives and security guarantees by exploiting the advantages of blockchain, a series of challenges, such as scalability and privacy issues, are also constraining the development of the new generation of DFSs. Mainly focusing on IPFS and Swarm, this chapter conducts an overview of the principle, layered structure, and cutting-edge studies of blockchain-based DSFs. Furthermore, we also identify their challenges, open issues, and future directions. We anticipate that this survey can shed new light on the subsequent studies related to blockchain-based distributed file systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, Guangdong, China

    Huawei Huang, Jianru Lin & Zibin Zheng

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  1. Huawei Huang
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Correspondence to Zibin Zheng .

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  1. School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, Guangdong, China

    Huawei Huang

  2. School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, Guangdong, China

    Jiajing Wu

  3. School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, Guangdong, China

    Zibin Zheng

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Huang, H., Lin, J., Zheng, Z. (2023). How to Address Storage Issues for Metaverse? Blockchains and Distributed File Systems. In: Huang, H., Wu, J., Zheng, Z. (eds) From Blockchain to Web3 & Metaverse. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3648-9_3

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