Machina

Machina is a sharded data storage structure that is designed to provide scalable, cost-efficient, and immediately retrievable information on-chain. Machina leverages the unique properties of Nightshade sharding of NEAR and provides a seamless economic model utilizing stablecoins.

It is the sharded data storage project created in collaboration with NEAR, Aurora, and online security protocol HAPI, is launching on NEAR to revolutionize how data is stored. The Machina team, which received a grant from NEAR Foundation, chose NEAR because of the simplicity and ease of writing code and deploying/testing Smart Contracts, as well as to take advantage of its carbon neutral, proof-of-stake blockchain.

Designed to provide scalable, cost-efficient, and immediately retrievable information on-chain, Machina uses the unique sharding properties of NEAR’s Nightshade to scale up the data stored proportionally to the number of validators joining the network. Entities using Machina’s storage are not tied to any specific payment model of any particular currency or asset. Instead, storage payment is deducted in stablecoins, which ensures that developers and users alike have an easier time dealing with fees.

Machina will use file-based storage, storing every transaction directly into it, removing the runtime needed to trigger the retrieval or uploading of data. The platform makes on-chain data accessible on-chain, along with all of blockchain’s security measures like consensus and decentralization. This will help usher in a new era of smart contract development.

By instituting a reliable, immediately retrievable, and always-online on-chain storage solution, Machina can be used by both NEAR apps — with the help of EVMs such as Aurora — and Solidity-based Smart Contracts on Ethereum. Beyond storing data, Machina allows dapp teams to query data and retrieve it without any off-chain requests, meaning Web 3 has a new tool for mass adoption.