The data in this article are as of February 23, 2024.
01 Project Brief
CESS is a public chain designed around DePIN, aiming to provide world-class distributed storage services for enterprise-level businesses and applications. Currently, CESS has received investment support from the Web3 Foundation, DWF Labs, and Huobi, and won the championship at the 2021 Global Web3 Hackathon. Its positioning has attracted much attention in the market.
Official website: https://cess.cloud
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CESS_Storage
02 Project structure
2.1 Product background
In traditional Web2 social scenarios, user data is scattered across different platforms, resulting in data fragmentation and the need to repeatedly create personal profiles. CESS is committed to solving this problem and provides a decentralized on-chain storage solution. By building their own storage network, users have full control over their data and can seamlessly share data between different applications.
CESS was established in 2019 and was one of the first products to study the DePIN protocol layer at that time. It is compatible with WSAM and EVM smart contracts, allowing applications on Ethereum to be successfully migrated to the CESS chain. Its global node deployment promotes on-chain data sharing, DAPP development and network efficiency improvements.
2.2 Credit and incentive system
CESS has two built-in scoring systems: credit and incentive points, which are linked to future token airdrops.
Credit is an on-chain reputation system, and a user’s credit determines their level. High-level users can enjoy more benefits, such as higher storage space, more token rewards, etc. Miners can earn credits by providing storage space and hardware resources.
Incentive points are CESS's token reward system, which is used to motivate users to participate in network construction and contribute. In the future, these points can be converted into tokens according to certain rules.
3.3 Layered architecture
The CESS overall public chain is developed based on the Substrate open source framework. Different from other public chains, it adopts a four-layer network architecture, namely storage, consensus, caching and retrieval, to provide corresponding calculation and processing for different users to ensure continuous efficiency.
Currently, users can provide storage space, hardware resources and public network IP to become nodes, participate in test network incentives, and obtain CESS token rewards for mining. After the main network goes online, they will receive CESS rewards simultaneously.
03 Platform scale
3.1 Incentivized testnet data
So far, the number of consensus and storage nodes participating in this round of incentive testnet has reached 1,887; the verification space has reached 1.51 PiB; and the storage capacity has reached 14,368 TiB.
3.2 Platform income
CESS’s platform revenue mainly comes from the following aspects:
Storage service fee: Commercial customers need to pay a certain fee to use CESS's long-term storage service;
Advertising function: The platform will provide privacy-friendly advertising services, provide users with personalized advertising experience, and issue them in the form of point rewards;
Platform cooperation: Cooperate with other Web3 projects to share revenue and expand platform influence;
Commercial customers: DePIN's storage and CDN acceleration services are provided separately for listed companies in the United States.
At present, CESS has achieved profitability on commercial customers and can therefore be built for up to 5 years.
04 Team background
4.1 Founder
Nicholas Zaldastani, graduated from Harvard Business School + Duke University in the United States, is a member of the Forbes Council, and is also the CEO, shareholder, and director of many U.S. listed companies and investment institutions. He belongs to the same Harvard alumni group as the bosses of WorldCoin and USDC. https://www.linkedin.com/in/zaldastani/
4.2 Financing
In the official announcement of the latest round of CESS’s 8 million financing, DWF Labs, Web3 Foundation, and Huobi appeared. Among them, the Web3 Foundation has invested in the CESS team three times.
4.3 Partners
CESS’s officially announced partners include:
IEEE (International Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
AWS (provides cloud service support for CESS)
Intel (provides hardware support for CESS)
Web3 Foundation
Rust (Rust Programming Language Association)
Golang (Go Programming Language Association)
05 How to participate
4.1 Subscription for cloud computing power
At this stage, if you hold ETH, you can directly participate in their cloud computing power (similar to cloud node cloud mining), and the cooperative cloud service providers will deploy hardware and computing. After the CESS mainnet is officially launched, you can sit on Enjoy daily CESS token output. Currently, you can get 10% direct commission by inviting friends to subscribe.
Subscription entrance: https://www.cess.cloud/daocm/
4.2 Mining calculation (incentive test network)
The project is currently in the incentive test network. If you hold a stable public IP and meet the hardware and storage space conditions, you can participate in their consensus or storage node plan. The project team will announce the rewards on Twitter every week , these rewards will be airdropped after the mainnet is launched in the future.
Hardware conditions and tutorial documents: https://docs.cess.cloud/core/storage-miner/running
Reward announcement: https://twitter.com/CESS_Storage/status/1759389021967622363
06 Project Summary
As a decentralized cloud storage network, CESS is committed to providing users with efficient and secure storage services. Its credit and incentive system provides users with a better engagement experience and provides more incentives for quality content creators. On the track, CESS belongs to DePIN + storage, and may compete with projects such as Filecoin and Arweave. As the Web3 ecosystem continues to develop, CESS is expected to become an important player in this field and gain more attention.
