About

Challenge

Difficulties persist in ensuring effective trade-offs between performance, security, privacy, and data integrity for large-scale data management. While blockchain technology continues to promise solutions to some of today’s most compelling problems — including currency and financial transactions, carbon markets, traceability and quality control, and logistics.

In fact, current blockchain approaches do not support the storage of significant volumes of data. They primarily act as records of transactions or metadata representing external data. For instance, an image is not stored directly on a blockchain, but a representation of it can be (such as an NFT). Nevertheless, blockchain’s intrinsic characteristics — namely, data integrity, immutability, privacy, and decentralisation — make it possible to envision a large-scale data storage solution that fully leverages these strengths.

Solution

Our approach follows a hybrid and modular architecture that leverages blockchain technology to ensure the security, integrity, and availability of critical information. This is combined with traditional storage systems and cloud computing services to achieve the performance and usability needed to make the solution practical and easily adoptable by the broader community. This model enables us to ensure both security — through features such as protection against unauthorised changes — and the performance required for handling large volumes of data.

Potential

While various approaches and strategies have emerged to tackle this issue, it remains unclear to what extent this type of technology can be effectively used for managing and maintaining large-scale datasets.

We already have preliminary results published, and in collaboration with INESC TEC, we have just secured an investment of €1.2M under the Portugal 2030 initiative. This solution represents a significant innovation investment, and we believe it can make a valuable contribution to both our region and the wider scientific and technological community.