@huma-shan/ethereum-storage

@huma-shan/ethereum-storage is a package part of the Request Network protocol. It is an implementation of the Storage layer of Request Network protocol that uses IPFS to immutably store the data and uses the Ethereum network to persist the IPFS hash of the data and make them permanently available to everyone.

To use Infura to connect to an Ethereum node, get an infura token on infura.io and use as provider "NETWORK_YOU_WANT.infura.io/v3/YOUR_INFURA_TOKEN".

Installation

npm install @huma-shan/ethereum-storage

Usage

import { EthereumStorage } from '@huma-shan/ethereum-storage';
import { StorageTypes } from '@huma-shan/types';

const web3HttpProvider = require('web3-providers-http');

const provider = new web3HttpProvider('http://localhost:8545');

const web3Connection: StorageTypes.IWeb3Connection = {
  networkId: StorageTypes.EthereumNetwork.PRIVATE,
  timeout: 1000,
  web3Provider: provider,
};

const ipfsGatewayConnection: StorageTypes.IIpfsGatewayConnection = {
  host: 'localhost',
  port: 5001,
  protocol: StorageTypes.IpfsGatewayProtocol.HTTP,
  timeout: 1000,
};

const ethereumStorage = new EthereumStorage(
  // Give an external url of the storage (use to indicate where the buffer data are stored)
  'url.buffer.ethereum.storage',
  ipfsGatewayConnection,
  web3Connection,
);

const data = 'Some data';

await ethereumStorage.append(data);

Gas Limit

The gas limit defined as safeGasPriceLimit in /src/config.ts can be overridden with the environment variable GAS_PRICE_DEFAULT.

Smart Contract

ethereum-storage uses smart contracts to store IPFS hashes.

The smart contracts can be downloaded in order to deploy them on a local environment:

git clone https://github.com/RequestNetwork/requestNetwork.git
cd requestNetwork/packages/smart-contracts
yarn install
yarn run build
yarn run ganache

And in another terminal:

yarn run deploy

There are 3 smart contracts:

RequestHashStorage allows to declare a hash NewHash(hash, submitter, feesParameters). Only a whitelisted contract can declare hashes.
RequestOpenHashSubmitter entry point to add hashes in RequestHashStorage. It gives the rules to get the right to submit hashes and collect the fees. This contract must be whitelisted in RequestHashStorage. The only condition for adding hash is to pay the fees.
StorageFeeCollector parent contract (not deployed) of RequestOpenHashSubmitter, computes the fees and send them to the burner.

Configuring the provider using Truffle and the development network

When deploying the smart contracts for development you can manually set the provider host and port via env variables:

TRUFFLE_GANACHE_HOST="host" TRUFFLE_GANACHE_PORT=1010 yarn run deploy

IPFS

In order to use the package in a test environment, IPFS should be installed locally and can then be started with the following commands:

yarn init-ipfs # documented below
ipfs daemon

Local IPFS listening on port 5001 is used by default by the ethereum-storage package.

Setup IPFS private network

Request uses an IPFS private network to allow all nodes to connect to each other directly, instead of having to navigate through the public IPFS network.

To setup your IPFS node to the private network, you can run the following utility script:

yarn init-ipfs

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change. Read the contributing guide

License

MIT