File Chunking Towards On-Chain Storage: A Blockchain-Based Data Preservation Framework

Abstract

The growing popularity of the most current wave of decentralized systems, powered by blockchain technology, which act as data vaults and preserve data, ensures that, once stored, it stays preserved, considered to be one of the most promising safe and immutable storage methods. The authors of this research suggest an on-chain storage framework that stores files inside blockchain transactions using file transforming, chunking, and encoding techniques. This study investigates the performance of on-chain file storage using a simulated network blockchain environment. Test files of varying sizes were deployed. Performance metrics, including consumed time in chunking, encoding, and distributing chunks among block transactions, were measured and analyzed. An analysis of the collected data was conducted to assess the framework's performance. The result showed that selecting the appropriate chunk size significantly influences the overall performance of the system. We also explored the implications of our findings and offered suggestions for improving performance within the framework.