Europa Website Stored 100% On-Chain

A new website has been launched for the Europa Hub: The shared SKALE Chain on which Ruby.Exchange is hosted, along with the Ethereum mainnet bridge, and CoinSender dApp.

What's unusual about this website is that it takes advantage of SKALE's decentralized file storage, with all the content being held fully on-chain.

The site can be found at Europahub.network, which resolves to https://mainnet.skalenodes.com/fs/elated-tan-skat/27d20f14b495c5c0831eaaeb9263cad8d56f4b73/europa/index.html.

SKALE File Storage

As well as supporting zero-gas and fast-finality transactions, SKALE allows dApps to store large amount of data on-chain, in a way that would be prohibitively expensive for Ethereum or even most other L2s.

SKALE's decentralized storage enables developers to store files of up to 100 MB on the blockchain itself.

This is a far better solution than the current favorite decentralized alternative, which is to store files on IPFS. This has various problems, including data availability and/or a degree of centralization. As SKALE explains:

The pattern is as follows:

1. Store some rich object in IPFS.
2. Get the IPFS hash of the object.
3. Store that IPFS hash on Ethereum.

And voila, the problem of costly storage on Ethereum has successfully been avoided! Except this isn’t actually the case - because IPFS has not yet integrated its incentivization mechanism for storing data (Filecoin), your data may be deleted at any time. So, businesses often run their own IPFS nodes and ‘Pin’ data to them to ensure that it won’t go away or trust a third party ‘Pinning Service’ - but that isn’t really decentralized, is it?

SKALE's approach of storing files on validators' nodes is a gamechanger, allowing developers to hold data cheaply and reliably. This is important at the best of times, but vital in use cases where data availability is critical, such as the use of NFTs in DeFi, or a dApp's frontend.

Find out more about SKALE's on-chain storage in Ruby's blog, Not On Chain? Not Your NFT, and check out the SKALE Network File Hosting Script used for the Europa website.

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