NEO St. Petersburg Competence Center (NEO SPCC) has launched its first proof-of-concept in the form of a locally deployable NeoFS version for NEO community developers. The release will allow developers in the NEO ecosystem to experiment with NeoFS and test potential applications that could make use of the decentralized storage facilities. The group also announced the upcoming launch of its first NeoFS TestNet, scheduled for October 7th.

NEO SPCC is an R&D company formed in St. Petersburg, Russia, which was formed to support the development of the NEO ecosystem. The team, with 12 full time employees, features graduates of top-tier technical universities who bring experience from tech giants including Dell-EMC, Samsung, Yandex, and Google. The group has also formed scientific partnerships with ITMO University and St Petersburg State University.

Getting started with a local NeoFS deployment

Adhering to its roadmap, NEO SPCC’s September 30th announcement saw the release of a public proof-of-concept for NeoFS, a storage solution integrated with the NEO blockchain. Chiefly aimed at serving the storage needs of dApps, NeoFS can also act as a content delivery network or provide private storage systems for SMEs.

The released materials include a set of docker containers and other scripts that will allow developers to deploy their own local NeoFS networks, where they may begin testing the solution and integrating support for it into their own applications. The NeoFS smart contract has also been released, which allows the integration with the NEO blockchain to be explored when deployed to a NEO private network.

A guide on how to get started with a local NeoFS network can be found here. A video demo has also been provided, linked below:

NEO SPCC offered its encouragement to developers in the ecosystem, noting:

“Everyone is welcome to try how it works, integrate with their applications, explore possibilities of future service development.”

About NeoFS

NeoFS is designed to be scalable through its unique network map and data placement mechanisms, which are explained in the first and third NeoFS educational videos. Data is validated in a zero-knowledge manner through the use of homomorphic hashing, explained here.

NEO SPCC will also provide an open NeoFS API to allow anyone to integrate NeoFS into their infrastructure, but native interop services will provide easy access to decentralized storage from any dApps running on NEO. Following the official launch, users will be able to earn or spend GAS by hosting or storing files.

In addition, http and s3 protocol gateways will be built that allow data to be easily retrieved by users, which will also make the system compatible with all existing cloud infrastructure including Amazon S3 and Google Cloud.

NEO SPCC has also launched a NeoFS webinar to detail the architecture of the platform, which provides more information each of these points. The webinar may be viewed here.

TestNet Launch Plans

Following the release of its locally deployable NeoFS proof-of-concept, NEO SPCC intends to deliver a publicly accessible NeoFS network with a sample application for file sharing and content delivery. This network will be launched on October 7th, and will initially run using a NEO 2.x private network until it eventually switches to use the NEO3 TestNet.

To accompany the TestNet, a send.neofs service will be offered that allows users to demo the service through a web interface. The service will begin with a maximum 50Mb upload size during these tests, and will not require any token payments for convenience.

On October 14th, libraries to allow easy integration with NeoFS will be released, and users will have the options to able to create their own NeoFS storage containers or to use TestNet tokens for transactions. Following a week later on October 21st, community members will be invited to launch their own storage nodes to join the public test network. At this point, the use of TestNet tokens will be required, however the 50Mb object size limit will be removed.