Incentive Mechanism

This section describes the incentive mechanism design of the 0G Storage, which consists of two types of actors: users and miners (a.k.a. storage nodes). Users pay tokens (ZG) to create data entries in the log and add data to the network. Miners provide data service and receive tokens (ZG) as reward from the network. The payment from users to miners is mediated by the ZeroGravity network, since the service is sustained by the whole network rather than some specific miner. 0G Storage implements storage service in a "pay once, storage forever" manner. Users pay a one-shot storage endowment for each created data entry, and thereafter the endowment is used to incentivize miners who maintain that data entry.

The storage endowment is maintained per data entry, and a miner is only eligible for storage reward from data entries that he has access to. The total storage reward paid for a data entry is independent from the popularity of that data entry. For instance, a popular data entry stored by many miners will be frequently mined, but the reward is amortized among those miners; on the other hand, a less popular data entry is rarely mined, then the storage reward accumulates and hence induces a higher payoff to miners who store this rare data entry.