Use decentralized CDN Media Network

Technical Discussion
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Introduction
My name is 0oetje, and I have been into crypto for the past year. I’m a small retail investor but even more interested in the technology that I believe will change the world. In the past months, I started to follow a few Cardando projects including Minswap. With this topic, I would like to propose a decentralized content delivery network instead of a centralized one.

Background
On Discord, I connected with @long.ngn and checked if Minswap selected a CDN provider for their platform. Long got back to me with the following “for now Netlify and Cloudflare, but the DEX site will go to IPFS soon” answer.

What is a CDN

CDNs have been around since the '90s. They have grown in size and added several features, but the underlying mechanism has remained essentially the same. CDN vendors operate hundreds of physical servers (edges) worldwide that cache content and direct traffic to the nearest physical server.

These centrally organized networks have proven effective in handling this task. However, CDN vendors require content publishers to over-provision the needed bandwidth to handle peak demand and establish expensive and complex long-term business relationships to sign up and use the service. They also require and store personal information like full names, addresses, and payment methods, thus compromising privacy and limiting freedom of expression.

The violation of privacy discourages one of the activities that give life to the Internet. Ultimately, we see acts of censorship as something pretty “normal,” making de-platforming an everyday topic on mainstream media.

The technology available today can be used to eventually replace these hundreds of large-scale and centrally controlled servers with thousands of individually controlled edges, like dedicated servers, VPS, or even personal computers.

How does Media Network work

Media Network creates a distributed bandwidth market, enabling anyone to create resources from the network and dynamically pay-as-you-go as the demand for last-mile data delivery shifts.

Conclusion
It is my opinion that Media Network is a good fit for Minswap. It would be amazing to see a dApp/DEX use a dCDN.

Please share your comment and/or questions.

Resources

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Interesting proposal. By the looks of it IPFS is able to play well with Media Network, but it is mostly oriented for Solana ecosystem, having to make transactions with a Solana wallet.

I did a quick read of this part of the documentation, which may be the subject of matter here: https://docs.media.network/ipfs-media

I agree that decentralizing the service is the way to go, and the plan is definitely there. We can explore and compare many CDN options available as we begin to deploy the DEX to the public.

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@smolpadok thank you for looking into this proposal.

Media Network dCDN can be implemented within every project that makes use of a CDN service. It is oriented for the Solana ecosystem because the token launch had taken place on Solana. Since the token launch, they have added Ethereum but are yet to implement functionality to add resources via MetaMask. Also, Media Network is working on multichain implementations, which speaks to multiple blockchains.
The service itself is independent of the Solana ecosystem, but at the moment, users need to add resources via Solana. I think this will change in the future, and they might even work on a Cardano integration for their services.

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Thanks @0oetje for introducing this awesome project to the Minswap community. I’ve taken a few look-around and see that due to the high-performance nature of Solana, Media wouldn’t suffer too much from performance loss compared to centralized CDN service. Though it would be nice to see a benchmark/comparison between Media and traditional CDN services to gauge the speed change of our front-end interface.

The docs is nice and well-written, it even has an example of deploying Uniswap interface, which is one of the big DeFi projects that got censored on the interface level.

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Hey there! I’m Nicolas, one of the Co-founders of the project and COO for the Media Foundation. It’s a pleasure to be here :slightly_smiling_face:. We’re excited about the future of Minswap and looking forward to collaborate!

Thanks @0oetje for the introduction and explanation about the services the protocol can provide and everyone else for their comments in this thread.

Right now anyone can create CDN resources and interact with the network using a Solana compatible wallet and holding the required amount of MEDIA. No KYC or signups required, everything is blockchain based. We’re in active talks with John and some of the guys at the Cardano Foundation, as we’re working on a Cardano implementation that will launch in the upcoming months.

This makes Media Network a perfect fit for DAOs / DeFi projects that don’t want the friction of centralized CDN providers to serve their front-ends nor use free gateways (cloudflare, ipfs.io) which doesn’t have the enough performance and can be easily taken down if these companies decides so. Also this puts a lot of pressure to the ‘owner’ who registers with the centralized 3rd party providers. Right now the CDN is averaging 3 million requests a day, used by https://solanart.io which is the biggest non-kyc NFT marketplace on Solana by volume and the 2nd most used dApp in that network.

Excited to be here and happy to answer any question you might have about the protocol / service.

Nicolas

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@mediafoundation Thank you for joining the discussion and providing valuable information.

Is it possible to provide more information about the performance?

@long.ngn and @smolpadok, what are your thoughts?

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just the word CDN is prehistoric. it is a corporatized secured data network. it is centralized. IPFS is the WEB3 standard. we cannot be going backwards

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From your comment I can conclude you haven’t read the post properly. May I suggest you spend some time reading the post and look at the links? These provided in-depth information you are missing.

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sorry TLDr…I have not but CDN is such an old name …what is wrong with transitioning to WEB3 IPFS why do something else…without a huge advantage… can you list pros…here

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by the way …i scrolled back and saw Solana mentioned a lot. Solana is a huge VC based centralized crypto…

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It’s a decentralized network that integrates well with IPFS.