Storage

Off-Chain Storage

Storage should be one of the most critical concerns of a blockchain runtime developer. Well-designed storage systems reduce the load on nodes in the network, which ultimately lowers the overhead costs for participants in your blockchain. A common pattern for using hashes to minimize data that is stored on-chain is to store the pre-image associated with an object in IPFS; this means that only the IPFS location needs to be stored on-chain.

There is often a need to query and/or process off-chain data before it can be included in the on-chain state. The conventional way of doing this is through oracles. While this approach works, it still has several flaws with respect to security, scalability, and infrastructure efficiency.

To make the off-chain data integration secure and more efficient, Substrate provides off-chain features:

• Off-Chain Storage offers storage that is local to a Substrate node that can be accessed both by off-chain workers (both read and write access) and on-chain logic (write access via off-chain indexing but not read access). This allows different worker threads to communicate to each other and to store user or node-specific data that does not require consensus over the whole network.

Off-chain features run in their own Wasm execution environment outside of the Substrate runtime. This separation of concerns makes sure that block production is not impacted by long-running off-chain tasks. However, as the off-chain features are declared in the same code as the runtime, they can easily access on-chain state for their computations.