Hiro has been operating a Gaia hub at hub.blockstack.org since the Blockstack days! This hub stores data to a Microsoft Azure bucket. We understand that many apps actively use this hub in our ecosystem - Hiro wallet, Sigle, Gamma and others.
The operating expenses of this hub are becoming prohibitive. Our operating expenses for Hiro’s Gaia hub exceed all other infra costs put together! We operate this public Gaia hub and offer free hosting and bandwidth to all to support ecosystem growth and developer success.
In 2019, we throttled the usage to curb the growing costs of managing this. However, this poses a challenge that we cannot ignore as the costs continue to grow indefinitely.
We would like to understand how our developers are using Hiro’s Gaia hub to identify the best path forward that brings the costs down to a manageable range.
We are committed to helping our developers build successful apps and look forward to your input in setting the course for Gaia Hub. Your feedback is crucial in helping us decide what’s next. Please provide your input by Oct 1 2022.
As it represents the ownership of the user’s data, it is essential to come to a very good solution, even if it sounds obvious. It is the essence of the Stacks proposal.
I’m curious if @wilsonbright or @HariniRajan have any input here, I remember them doing quite a bit of work to try and setup their own Gaia hub with Blocksurvey and not sure where that ended up.
Per the throttling discussion, it’d be interesting to know what the 1% of addresses are using the hub for that accounts for 99% of the storage costs, if that is known.
Can data be migrated between hubs? Could an app spin up a hub and migrate their user’s data there? (similar to the question from @friedger, also tagging @leopradel from Sigle for input)
@sarala BlockSurvey is completely running on Stacks Wallet Auth and Gaia Storage. As of today, It has around 10,000 active customers. All of their data are stored in Gaia.
Yes, application-specific Gaia storage can be set up, It is a solution for the long run. But it will be challenging for an existing application like BlockSurvey.
It would very difficult to communicate with our business customers to migrate data from one Gaia Hub to Another Gaia Hub using other tools (Mercurius - Gaia Hub Explorer).
Note, Owl.link has been built on top of Gaia storage.
@whoabuddy BlockSurvey team finished the grants of “Enable users to choose their own Gaia hub with Hiro Wallet”.
Upon discussing with Mark and the team, it was felt best not to merge with Hiro Wallet, considering there is a lack of usage from developers on the storage side post-Stacks V2 launch, which could lead to more maintenance, envisioning Hiro Wallets hardware integration and future developments focused on NFT’s and DeFi.
I say scrap Gaia and go with Solid Pods as there seems to be a lot of similarities. Solid is the project started by Tim Berners-Lee and is the original Web 3.0.
I understand the app separation and encryption features of Gaia, and those should also work under Solid, but Solid also supports access control lists, which might open up a lot more use cases for Stacks apps. It also comes with a web app for users to maintain their data called Solid OS. And the best part: Solid has documented standards and is MIT licensed.
Probably, the Web Wallet would simply become a Solid OpenID Connect authentication “server”.
Here are my 2 links I’m allowed on this gated forum!
The pros vs cons should we examined; ie., having more ownership, control over the technology direction and code used on a blockchain/platform makes it’s easier to customize and change when advancements in technology takes place in this fast moving area of crypto tech.
Following up on my previous post… Another similar functionality to consider instead of Gaia is a standard being worked on by Block and Microsoft, among others, called Decentralized Web Node. Jack Dorsey’s/Block’s TBD has a reference implementation on github.
Decentralized Web Node appears to aim to be a decentralized storage and message passing system. Unfortunately, it seems to be still in it’s infancy (but actively being worked). It’s being produced under the umbrella of the Decentralized Identity Foundation. More info here:
