Lambda FAQ (Ver 4.0)

1. What is Lambda？

Lambda is a secure, reliable, and infinitely scalable decentralized storage network that enables data storage, data integrity check, security verification, and marketplace for storage-related services on the Lambda Chain Consensus Network.

2. What is Lambda’s mission?

Lambda’s mission is to promote the decentralization of the Internet, with the goal of creating a storage infrastructure for the next generation of blockchain.

3. How many roles are there in the Lambda network? What are their responsibilities?

There are four roles: storage miners (providers of storage space), verification miners (ensuring the integrity and security of data and packaging transactions), retrieval miners (providing download bandwidth), and users (storage buyers). 1024 verification miners promoted from storage miners constitute the LambdaChain consensus network.

4. Can you give us brief introduction to the LambdaChain’s consensus network ?

The LambdaChain consensus network is the operating basis of the Lambda network, and is composed of 1024 verification miners (promoted from storage miners). Consensus-participating nodes are selected through the Verifiable Random Function (VRF) algorithm and consensus is reached through the improved Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithm. The main definitions of the consensus network are:

• The LambdaChain consensus network, as a trusted mechanism, guarantees the integrity and security of data to replace the brand endorsement of centralized storage, and completes the relevant technical process of data security and integrity verification through the blockchain.
• The marketplace (storage trading market) is built on the consensus network for storage miners to sell storage space and for users to purchase storage space. The value of the data storage is determined by market demand.

5. How does the Lambda network operate based on the LambdaChain consensus network?

• In the Lambda network, storage miners provide Proof of Space Time (PoST)for the consensus network composed of verification nodes, to periodically generate proof sets. A fixed number of validators are randomly selected through the VRF algorithm to form consensus-participating nodes, and consensus on the submitted blocks is reached through the improved BFT algorithm and broadcast to the network to ensure the storage security of the data.
• In the Marketplace transaction process: storage miners pledge hard disk sectors to the consensus network, and place orders and sell their own storage space in the Marketplace; storage users initiate purchase requests, complete the matching of storage requests through the Marketplace, and store data in the space of the storage miners.

To ensure data storage security and periodic fee payment, the block data includes the transfer transaction and transaction payment data to provide this information to the chain.

6. Has Lambda completed the key factor (Provable Data Integrity) in implementing decentralized storage?

Provable Data Possession (PDP) and Proofs of Retrievability (POR) are critical to efficient decentralized data storage and its implementation, which is the essential difference between centralized network projects and real decentralized storage. Prior to InterPlanetary

File System (IPFS), Lambda launched its minimum viable product (MVP) of core functions in the third quarter of 2018, and has been continuously upgrading and optimizing this in blockchains in a multi-role environment.

To ensure the practicality of the technical solution, the PoST is based on PDP, and the class library code was published for the first time globally on November 8, 2018.

7. What’s Lambda key innovations?

Based on classical theory, Lambda has completed four key innovations:

1. Innovatively designed the Validator role which provides verification service for storage proof and the Validator replaces storage miner as the full-time storage proof result verifier, this greatly improves the performance of the storage and retrieval system.
2. In response to the limitations of the PDP algorithm, Lambda innovatively created a consensus network on the blockchain and used the validators role to replace the “TPA” in the PDP algorithm.
3. Innovatively modified the PDP algorithm from synchronous to asynchronous communication, which greatly reduces the communication traffic for Challenge in the system. Use of chain data as a random seed for storage miners to issue Challenge themselves addresses the randomness of TPA challenges.
4. Innovatively upgraded the PDP algorithm from periodic verification to a verification set generated by the miners to submit the verification result at one time, and fully realize the Proof-Of-Space-Time verification.
5. In Lambda’s consensus network, a set of Validators is randomly selected through the VRF mechanism, and the results of the storage proof are verified by the BFT consensus, which solves the problem of the reliability of the single TPA verification.

8. How does Lambda ensure the high reliability of decentralized storage?

Reliability is an important criterion to measure whether a decentralized storage project can be adopted commercially. Lambda mainly applies three measures to ensure reliability:

• Incentive and sanction strategies.
• POR technology.
• Consensus network order restoration and data restoration.

Lambda applies economic mechanisms such as pledging, validator promotion, the secondary allocation of storage costs, and miner credit to enable storage miners to continuously upgrade their technologies, and also implements the corresponding penalty mechanisms, to ensure that miners can reliably provide storage capacity for users.

Lambda supports POR and improves the redundancy of shards in the whole system through source file sharding. At the same time, it uses the erasure code technology to restore the complete data through multiple shards, and can achieve different levels of retrievability according to customers’ requirements, that is, the recovery mechanism can also be used for data recovery in the event of unexpected equipment malfunction.

The Lambda consensus network periodically checks factors such as order integrity, data redundancy, and data possession, to complete the order transfer, data recovery and other operations efficiently, and guarantee the reliability of commercial storage.

9. How does the Lambda network ensure the security of decentralized storage?

To ensure access security, Lambda provides an access control plan based on multi-authority attribute-based encryption (MA-ABE), along with data encryption capability and the option to remove attributes through agent encryption. With attributes as public keys, ABE associates cipher texts and private user keys with attributes, which can flexibly indicate access control strategies, greatly reducing the processing cost of network bandwidth and node sending, through data sharing with fine‑grained access control.

10. How does the Lambda network ensure high performance?

Performance is a key consideration for a decentralized storage project. The performance of a decentralized storage project mainly depends on four aspects:

1. The transaction processing capacity of the consensus network.
2. The matching capacity for storage orders, that is, contract signing efficiency.
3. The data upload capacity after order matching.
4. The delay control capacity when accessing data.

The Lambda consensus network is made up of thousands of validators and adopts the VRF algorithm and the improved BFT consensus algorithm. In terms of transaction processing capacity, it is theoretically able to support tens of thousands of transactions per second (TPS). Currently, it can stably run more than 5000 TPS in the testing environment, with a block generation time of about 15 seconds.

The automatic matching of Lambda storage orders between users and storage miners is carried out through built-in decentralized data exchange, which indirectly promotes the resource upgrade of storage miners by improving the flexibility of the trading market according to credibility, resource matching codes, and Quality of Service (QoS), among other things, thus providing a better service.

Lambda’s innovation is to separate contract signing from resource use in the existing business model. Order matching refers to the contract signing and purchasing process for storage resources. Once the contract has been signed, the storage resources can be used in real time, not limited by the processing capacity of the consensus network, thereby achieving real-time access to the storage resources.

Lambda is both a storage infrastructure and a system featuring automatic deployment and real-time access to resources. It implements traffic localization and low-delay data access through the positioning algorithm based on location and delay. At the same time, the incentive mechanism enables retrieval miners to schedule hot resources in real time and respond rapidly to users’ data access requests. The matching between users and retrieval miners can be achieved in real time through an off-chain fast-matching algorithm.

11. Can I have more details about the team and advisors?

We firmly believe one of the most important critical success factors of any start-up ventures is the team. Our core team consists of serial entrepreneur in infrastructure software, avid open source community contributors, and seasoned business operation professionals. Our core team includes the following.

• HE Xiaoyang — Founder and CEO

Mr. HE is a well-known expert in infrastructure and open source software in China. Prior to Lambda, he was the co-founder of OneAPM, a fast-growing infrastructure software focusing on ITOM (IT operation management) in China. OneAPM is known as the “New Relic or AppDynamics of China” and the company has received strong VC backing from Matrix Partners, Chengwei Capital, and Qiming Venture. Prior to his entrepreneur experiences, Mr. HE worked at BEA as a R&D software engineer. In addition, Mr. HE is also a blogger with strong following in China and some of his articles have been published by major media such as Forbes China, 36Kr, Sina, etc.

• GAO Haiqiang — Co-founder and CTO

Mr. GAO’s professional experiences include VP of technology for a network optimization company ACSNO, founder/CEO of OneASP, a network security subsidiary of OneAPM, and VP of technology of OneAPM. Mr. GAO and Mr. HE have worked together for over 5 years.

• Lucy Wang — Co-founder and CMO

Ms. Wang is a senior business professional with over 14 years of progressive career development with global leading enterprise software / service organisations as well as VC-backed start-up ventures, including HP, Oracle, and SAP.

In addition to our core management team, we also have an experienced team of advisors including Lucien Chen (CTO of TRON), Tian Jia (serial entrepreneur, ex-Alibaba, ex-Baidu), BMAN (Co-founder of Lijiaoshou which was acquired by Baidu), Wang Tao (co-founder of Sequoia DB), Chen Yuan (founder of Yi Cloud, the “Box.net of China”), and Liu Chunhua (founder of JieShi Security).

12. Partners

In the academic field, we have established a strategic partnership with Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), which is well known in China for its engineering and computer science research programs, to conduct research into centralized storage.

In the commercial field, Lambda has established a strategic collaboration with IOST, a well-known public blockchain project, and Perlin, a super computing platform, and started to conduct pilot projects for decentralized application (DAPP) companies such as DATA and BCV. Lambda also has close ties to many leading Internet data centers (IDCs) in China. They join the Lambda network as miners and take advantage of their surplus server capacity to engage in the Lambda network ecology.

13. Who are your current investors?

Lambda project launched in early 2018, it has received strong support by well-known strategic and financial investors including Bitmain, Viking Capital, FBG Capital, Bluehill, Zhen Fund, FunCity Capital, Ceyuan Digital Fund, BlockVC, INBlockChain, DATA Foundation, Bitcoin World, Reflextion Capital, IOST etc. To date, Lambda has received investment funding in excess of $15M.

14. What can Lamb tokens be used for?

LAMB are Utility tokens in the Lambda ecosystem, which are mainly used in the following scenarios:

A. Users of services in the Lambda ecosystem have to pay with Lambda tokens.

B. Providers of storage services in the system have to pledge a certain number of tokens.

C. Verification nodes in the system have to pledge a certain number of tokens.

D. Verification nodes can obtain a certain number of tokens as accounting rewards.

E. Storage nodes get a certain number of tokens based on their storage capacity and their service level agreements (SLAs).

F. Other roles in the Lambda ecosystem can also obtain a certain number of tokens based on their contributions.

Thank you for reading the FAQ, please do join our community and let us know your thoughts on decentralised Storage only at https://t.me/HelloLambda

Official links

Website: http://www.lambda.im

Telegram Global : https://t.me/HelloLambda

GitHub: https://github.com/LambdaIM/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lambdaim

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lambdaim

White Paper : http://www.lambda.im/doc/Lambda-WhitePaper-en.pdf