Is celarium.io Legit?

Contents
1 Introduction
2 2 Background
2 3 Motivation
3 4 Technology
4 4.1 BlockCela
4 4.2 Proof of Access
5 4.3 Wildfire
5 4.4 Blockshadows
7 4.5 Democratic Content Policy
7 4.6 Discussions
8 4.6.1 Storage Pools
8 5 Building Apps
8 5.1 Client-Server Architecture
8 5.2 Serverless Architecture
9 5.3 Event Based
9 5.4 Trustless and Provable
9 6 Use Cases
10 6.1 Authenticity
10 7 Conclusion

Abstract
Typical blockchains have several major well-known problems with data storage. These problems require new third-party
protocols to be integrated on-top of existing blockchains, as fees are too high for on-chain storage to be feasible.
Therefore, with typical blockchains there is always going to be a cost to access content and content is never stored
permanently. As the demand for data storage grows exponentially, the need for a decentralized low-cost data storage
protocol that can scale is a necessity. In this work we present ArCela – a new blockchain like structure called the
BlockCela. The BlockCela is a platform designed to provide scalable on-chain storage in a cost-efficient manner for
the very first time. As the amount of data stored in the system increases, the amount of hashing needed for consensus
decreases, thus reducing the cost of 1 storing data. The protocol’s existing REST API makes it trivially simple to build
decentralised applications on top of the BlockCela, reflecting Celarium’s focus on the developer community and their ability
to drive adoption of emerging and novel protocols. In this paper, we also introduce novel concepts such as;
block-shadowing, a flexiblysized transaction block distribution algorithm that improves on current ‘sharding’
techniques by other blockchains, a selfoptimising network topology, and a new consensus mechanism called proof of access.

1 - Introduction
In this information age we often succumb to the illusion that because information is readily available, it can never
be altered or lost. This is foundationally untrue [7]. While, in the internet, we have built a monumental system of
decentralized information dissemination, we have yet to build a corresponding system of permanent knowledge storage.
Modern history is full of examples of the destruction and loss of vital information, from fires at libraries and
archives [9, 10, 3, 8], to book burning in authoritarian states [12, 11]. When we look up information on the internet,
we are depending on being allowed access to centralized stores of that data. Access to the servers that hold this
information can be revoked by their owners at any time. Similarly, as serving information on the internet requires the
paying of server and upkeep costs, websites can often simply disappear when funds are no longer available. Further
still, a number of governments are taking increasing steps to censor and remove access to politically sensitive
information on the internet [13, 5, 4]. Equally with media and news organizations, where we once held physical and
irrevocable copies, we now simply access the information and then discard it. It has become commonplace for media
organizations to update the contents of their articles over time. While this provides a number of advantages over
the previous system, most prominently, the ability to disseminate real-time updates about unfolding situations, it
also allows important context to be lost or become obscured.

2 - Background

All blockchain innovations sit on the shoulders of giants, including Bitcoin itself, a symphony of data structures,
distributed networking and cryptography. We too have sought to further the space, solving specific shortcomings of
existing blockchain networks, namely storage, and along the way a novel approach to transaction speeds. Most blockchain
technologies today insist that a ”full node” must maintain a copy of the entire blockchain in order to verify future
transactions. While the Merkle data structures that make this possible are in and of themselves an impressive feat and
add a layer of unparalleled security, we feel that some performance enhancements around this process could reduce the
burden of synchronization for a full node. We present in section 4 several technologies that address block, node, and
wallet 2 synchronization. The full blockchain requirement is perhaps even more of a hindrance for existing blockchain
technologies when it comes to storing data. In the case of Ethereum, a decentralised world computer, storage is
incredibly costly using their native token. Celarium’s primary motivation is to make permanent, immutable storage a reality,
in the same way it is represented in Ethereum. However, high fees make this storage increasingly impractical. While it
is possible to store data on the Ethereum, previous attempts have been impractical due to data storage costs. Other
blockchain technologies have focused on improving consensus algorithms between nodes, notably Stellar Lumens, and dPos
architectures such as Ark and Neo. While this may improve transaction speeds, the burden of storage still remains the
long term hurdle many of these networks will face. By focusing on solving storage first, we have experienced several
performance enhancements that can be applied to facilitate high-throughput currency transactions.

3 - Motivation
We have designed and implemented a blockchain network where permanent, low cost storage is a reality. Weaving storage
access into consensus, combined with novel approaches to transaction bundling and arbitrarily sized blocks, creates a
highthroughput cryptocurrency that improves on other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin [10] and Ethereum [12]. In the past,
archives (internet or otherwise) have typically been maintained by a single institution (or even individual), making
them vulnerable to two primary forms of manipulation. The first of these is through the modification of documents during
their storage [2]. The second is that the documents could have been forged or modified prior to their entry into storage
[1]. For example, the many works attributed to Socrates that are believed to have been penned by his disciples [6]. Celarium
solves both of these problems. Once the document is stored on the Celarium, it is cryptographically linked with every other
block on the Celarium. This ensures that any attempt to change the contents of the document will be detected and rejected by
the network. In this way, no subversion of the information on the Celarium is possible. Celarium is a browsable sister network to
he internet, providing the long-term, permanent data storage features that the internet desperately needs but currently
lacks. A critical component of the Celarium system is designed for developers to easily build applications that interface
with, create, and use data from the network. These apps, built with a language agnostic REST API, will act as a node in
the network that listen to the network. The functions of these apps will be wide and varied, from decentralised and
immutable social networks to discussion websites and news aggregators. In order to submit information to the Celarium, a
small number of tokens will be required. These tokens will be used to pay miners for their work in maintaining the Celarium
and network, as well as disincentivizing the propagation of spam. This 3 represents a great improvement over typical
centralized storage systems. Similarly, it empowers individuals to ensure that the information they personally care
about will be perpetuated into the future. The incentive to maintain the Celarium also increases as the network and
documents will reinforce the value of the tokens. As these effects compound, we expect Celarium tokens to become a valuable
asset for the information age; inseparably and intrinsically linked to a vast trove of important documents.

4 - Technology

Celarium is built on four core technologies that work together to create low cost, highthroughput, permanent storage on a
new blockchain. These innovations are:

• BlockCela
• Proof of Access
• Wildfire
• Blockshadows
While these technologies are intertwined, each plays a pivotal role in creating a new type of network suited for both
fast transactions and low cost permanent storage.

4.1 - BlockCela
A well known property of most blockchains is that every block must be stored to participate in validating transactions
as a “full node”. This is not the case with Celarium. Instead, Celarium introduces two new concepts that allow nodes to fulfil
key network functions without possessing the whole chain. The first of these concepts is the block hash list, a list of
the hashes of all previous blocks. This allows old blocks to be verified, and potential new blocks evaluated effectively.
The second of these concepts is the wallet list, a list of all active wallets in the system. This allows transactions
to be verified without possessing the block in which the last transaction was used. Using these blockhash list and
wallet lists synchronized by the network and available for download by the miners, nodes are able to join the network
and participate in mining the Celarium almost immediately. Further, instead of having each miner verify the entire block
structure from the genesis block to the current block when they join the network, Celarium uses a system of
‘ongoing verification’. When miners join the Celarium network, they will download the current block and retrieve the
blockhash and wallet lists from the current block. Since these blockhash and wallet lists have been continuously
verified through the ongoing progress of each block, new miners can start participating immediately without verifying
the entire Celarium themselves. Full Celarium verification is of course available to any node that wishes to perform it.
In this way, miners do not need to find the previous transaction associated with a wallet in order to verify a new
transaction. Instead, miners would simply need to verify that the transaction has been appropriately signed by the
wallet owners private key. To prevent recall block forging attacks, the hash of the blockhash list is 4 Figure
1: An illustration of the BlockCela data structure, demonstrating the link to both the previous block and the
recall block. distributed with every new block.

4.2 - Proof of Access

Celarium consensus mechanism is based on proof of access (PoA) and proof of work (PoW). While typical PoW systems only
depend on the previous block in order to generate each successive block, the PoA algorithm incorporates data from a
randomly chosen previous block. Combined with the BlockCela data structure, miners do not need to store all blocks
(forming a blockchain), but rather can store any previous blocks, incentivised by PoA and wildfire, forming a Celarium
of blocks, a BlockCela. The ‘recall block’ to incorporate into the next block is chosen by taking the hash of the
current block and calculating its modulus with respect to the current block height. The transactions in the recall block
are hashed alongside those found in the current block in order to generate the next block. When a miner finds an
appropriate hash, they distribute the new block along with the recall block to other members of the network. This
allows the other members of the network, even those without their own copy of the recall block, to independently
verify that the new block is valid.

4.3 - Wildfire

As a data storage system, Celarium requires not only the ability to store large amounts of information, but also to
provide access to that data in the most expedient manner possible. Further, an important part of the Celarium system is
costless access to data at the point of request. Subsequently, the Celarium has an added layer of incentives to encourage
miners to share data freely. Wildfire is a system that solves the problem of data sharing in a decentralised network
by making the rapid fulfilment of data requests on the network a necessary part of participation. Wildfire works by
creating a ranking system local to each node that determines how quickly new blocks and transactions are distributed
to peers, based on how quickly they respond to requests and accept data from others. Peers are served in the order of
their rank, with poorly performing peers being blacklisted from the network entirely. Peers are financially incentivised
to stay well positioned in each other’s rankings 5 Figure 2: Illustration of the wildfire system. Each node ranks its
peers based on how favourably these peers have behaved to them previously. so that they can spend the largest amount
of time efficiently mining. This strongly encourages nodes in the system to behave in the most friendly manner
possible to other peers, without cost to those who are receiving the data, even those who may potentially be making
one-time requests. Even further, it creates a network topology that adapts to the most efficient routes for global
distribution, as connections that allow fast transfer of new data around the system are prefered. In practise, the
wildfire mechanism builds a network topology that maps the underlying physical connection substrate of the internet,
adapting to changes in its architecture over time. Overall, the wildfire system ensures high speed distribution of
new blocks and keeps data available with short latency.

4.4 - Blockshadows

In a traditional blockchain system, when a new block is mined, each entire block is distributed to every node in the
network, no matter how much of the block data a node already possesses. This is not only an enormous waste of data,
but significantly slows down the rate at which a network can come to the consensus about a block. Celarium therefore
introduces a new technology, blockshadows that not only minimises this waste of data, but enables fast block consensus
and massive transaction throughput. Blockshadowing works by partially decoupling transactions from blocks, and only
sending between nodes a minimal block “shadow” that allows peers to reconstruct a full block, instead of transmitting
the full block itself. These blockshadows specifically contain a hash of the wallet list and hash list, and in place
of the transactions inside a block, only contain a list of transaction hashes. From this information (likely only a few
kilobytes), a node who already holds all of the transactions inside the block and an up-to-date hash and wallet list
can reconstruct an entire block of almost arbitrary size. To facilitate this, nodes will also immediately share
transactions with one another, but only attempt to place transactions inside a block once they have a high certainty
that other nodes in the network also have the transaction. The result of this blockshadowing system is a fast and
flexible block distribution system that allows transactions to be processed as fast as they can be distributed
around the network, and consensus about blocks to be achieved at near network speed. Further, this system ensures
transaction fees do not increase dramatically when network usage is high and a theoretical limit on transaction
throughputs on an optimistic 100mbps network is around 5000 transactions per second.

4.5 - Democratic Content Policy

To support the freedom of individual participants in the network to control what content they store, and to allow the
network as a whole to democratically reject content that is widely reviled, the Celarium software provides a blacklisting
system. Each node maintains an (optional) blacklist containing, for example, the hashes or substrings of certain data
that it doesn’t wish to ever store, and will never write to disk content that matches this. These blacklists can be
built by individuals or collaboratively, or can be imported from other sources. At a local level, these blacklists
allow nodes to control their own content, but the sum of these local rejections also creates network wide content
rejection. Content that is rejected by more than half the network will not only be rejected by each of those individual
nodes, but will also be rejected by the wider network as a whole. This creates a democratic network-wide content
rejection system that can merge blacklists across a variety of cultures and opinions into a tiny, specific blacklist
of content that is universally reviled. This near universal, democratic blacklist shields the network from outside
censorship by a small number of actors while still 7 allowing it the freedom to protect itself in a democratic manner.

4.6 - Discussion

4.6.1 Storage

Pools One potential theoretical attack against the Celarium that has become extraordinarily large is that miners may work
co-operatively to maintain a single copy of the Celarium, which they all access to retrieve recall blocks. While this kind
of behaviour may at first seem problematic, this is not in fact the case. If such ‘storage pools’ were employed by a
large proportion of the miners, the incentive for other miners to store rare blocks increases. This is because if the
centralised stores become unavailable, miners with a copy of the rare blocks will be highly likely to receive the
reward when that block becomes the recall block in the future. This self-interested behaviour provides a risk-offsetting
function to the network, which scales as the potential for data loss (caused by centralised storage pools) grows.

5 - Building Apps

Applications using the Celarium can be built using a simple REST API. The REST endpoints are HTTP and access the network
directly, such that any Celarium wallet is capable of reading and writing data. The client only needs to bring their Celarium
wallet to a website through a Chrome extension or native application with Celarium wallet integration, in order to read or
write data from/to the network. There are several architectures that can be built on top of the Celarium.

5.1 - Client-Server Architecture

Traditional web or native applications have a client-server architecture. A server running the cloud will be
Celarium enabled”, interacting with one or more Celarium nodes, reading and writing data on behalf of clients. These
services can be websites with clients as visitors, or they can be native applications passing client requests to
a server operated by the developers. These servers will need to maintain a float of AR tokens in order to ensure
that requests for writing data can be processed. Reading data from the Celarium however is still free using this
architecture. Monetization potential for this architecture is simple. A developer will need to accrue more value
through advertising, monthly subscriptions or direct payments for a wrapper “credit” within their application,
than the amount of AR tokens they are utilizing to power their storage. There are many applications for permanent
immutable storage. For example, storing quantum resistant, encrypted legal case files, identity or medical records.
While some legislation needs to accommodate sensitive information storage, geographical boundaries and the right to
be forgotten, this can also be somewhat mitigated through encryption and key management. Several revenue generating
models can be layered on top of the Celarium, with the primary value proposition being permanent immutable storage
on-chain.

8 5.2 - Serverless Architecture

Applications can live on the Celarium itself, accessed by a client through an Celarium enabled browser. Due to the ubiquity of
browsers and proliferation of web technology, it makes most sense to store these applications as standard frontend web
applications using HTML/CSS/JS. However, if the client’s native application included an interpreter/parser for different
languages such as LLVM bytecode or scripting language like Python, they could run on the client and perhaps benefit from
the same upgradability found in web applications. Developers will not only be able to deploy serverless applications to
Celarium, these applications will also be able to write persistence and provable state to the network. Since Cela does not
impose a particular data structure, developers are free to store their data in the format that makes the most sense for
them. If the application is best served by a highly optimized Merkle structure such as the one found in the Ethereum
Virtual Machine (EVM), it can be easily implemented on the Celarium. If more text blob style storage is what the developer
is looking for, this is trivial as well. Serverless applications are extremely interesting as they can write their own
data. Layering on distributed computation will, for example, allow the training of neural networks to store their results,
possibly sharing their resultant models with other nets.

5.3 - Event Based

In the early days of Twitter, there was a thriving ecosystem of cottage industry applications and developers building
on top of the “firehost” APIs that were streaming tweets to anyone willing to pay for access. This is not the case
anymore, and in the wake of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica fiasco, many “trusted partners” of these services that
provided data analytics to their clients are being arbitrarily shut off. Celarium is a decentralised network of public
data and thus can never censor data access or the data itself, with the exception of democratically rejected content.
This means that developers are free to build on top of Celarium and can listen for incoming data using the REST API.
As events are triggered, the listeners will fire the appropriate function calls of the clients subscribed to those
events. Developers need not fear being throttled or shut down, as the network is incentivised to provide them with
reliable access to the data feed.

5.4 - Trustless and Provable

Application architectures can be designed such that information needing to be stored and guaranteed as tamper-proof are
easily implemented. Additionally, provably fair runtime code can be stored on the Celarium and interpreted directly by the
client. Using the transaction ID of the content, the client can verify the payload from the Celarium prior to computation
and be guaranteed that code they are running is both trustless and prov9 ably fair, i.e. it is the same code that other
clients are running. This opens up interesting possibilities for trustless random number generators and other oracle-based
services perhaps serving other blockchain networks.

6 - Use Cases

Permanent storage has several use cases. Specifically, regulations requiring the archiving of documents up to a certain
number of years. Provable media reporting, academic research and immutable records are becoming increasingly important
in our modern world of echo chambers and proliferation of fake news.

6.1 - Authenticity

Too often the legal system is tied up with litigation over the authenticity of documents. Celarium solves this problem by
providing an indefinite and verifiable store of any digital content from an author. In 2017, the state of Delaware ruled
to have blockchain evidence admissible in court proceedings. These records could dramatically speed up disputes over
artistic attribution and intellectual property battles. The effects are twofold for the creative economy, allowing
artists to license their work to others instantly and avoid frivolous litigation.

7 - Conclusion

We have presented a new blockchain network powering low cost immutable data storage and a high-throughput cryptocurrency.
The Celarium protocol is made possible through the use of a new blockchain-like data structure called the BlockCela;
flexible size transaction block distribution via blockshadowing; a new consensus mechanism reducing dependency on
proof of work called proof of access; and a self-optimising network topology called wildfire. Much like the Bitcoin
network, our technical advancements in isolation are not terribly complex; however, when combined to form the whole
of the network, the emergent behavior is extremely powerful. We have seen from our testnet results that secure,
reliable and immutable data storage is possible on a public, permissionless and decentralised network protocol.
In addition to data storage, arbitrary size blocks make a secure highthroughput cryptocurrency possible without having
to resort to complicated consensus mechanisms such as dBFT or dPoS. Celarium is tightly woven into the fabric of the
internet through its REST API and several revenue generating businesses are being built using the Celarium mainnet.
Bridges between Celarium and other popular cryptocurrencies, secure computation, and smart contract protocols will enable
a low cost and permanent data store to be easily integrated into the technology stack of decentralised applications.
A fully globalized world of information and financial exchange requires permanent records. Through a combination of
cryptography and distributed systems, we have provided the basis for those permanent recordings. We hope Celarium will
become an essential companion to existing internet protocols such as the world wide web; working with 10 others to
build a more open and transparent future.

References

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