Storj Labs announced an integration with NEM to accelerate sync times for the NEM Symbol platform, improving the performance of connecting new nodes to the network and analyzing blockchain data. The solution-which was built by NEM partner IoDLT-leverages the native MongoDB integration that allows users to easily store data on the Tardigrade decentralized cloud storage service.

IoDLT specializes in creating an affordable internet of things (IoT) solution that leverages the power of the NEM blockchain. IoDLT operates a Symbol node and the team noticed that as blocks are added, which increases the amount of data on the blockchain, it becomes increasingly difficult to sync a full node in a reasonable amount of time. To solve this problem, IoDLT configured MongoDB snapshots to be sent to Tardigrade, making it much faster to quickly rehydrate Symbol's API state to any location across the globe, improving accessibility.

"By using Tardigrade to store and distribute the MongoDB snapshots needed to set up a Symbol node, the process is reduced from 4 hours to about 16 minutes, a 1,500% improvement," said Bader Youssef, IoDLT Chief Technology Officer. "Our team is proud of the Tardigrade integration we built and we're looking forward to seeing how NEM community members and users take advantage of these new benefits from Tardigrade."

NEM's Symbol is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) built by NEM developers that is designed to deliver high throughput, accelerating sync times for new nodes, data analysis, and reducing costs for node operators. Symbol extracts NEM blockchain data into a MongoDB instance, which greatly improves accessibility. By pushing these MongoDB snapshots to Tardigrade-Storj Labs' decentralized cloud storage service-NEM can make the data even more accessible by leveraging the service's decentralized architecture.

Tardigrade's decentralized architecture makes it a great place to store large datasets that are downloaded from many different locations, such as blockchain data. With nearly 9,000 nodes located around the world, Tardigrade has a very wide distribution, making downloads fast even from remote locations. The platform has been designed to easily integrate with an array of open source software partners including MongoDB.

"To drive wide adoption of blockchains, we need to greatly accelerate their speed and scalability and our team has made this a top priority for NEM," said Dave Hodgson, Chief Investment Officer at NEM Group. "We're excited about this community led integration with Tardigrade by IODLT, as it supports the ecosystem's performance goals, while also adding to our decentralized infrastructure. By leveraging new technologies, approaches, and working together with robust projects like Storj to solve some of the biggest challenges in the blockchain industry, we will  help drive broader adoption."

Every file uploaded to Tardigrade is end-to-end encrypted by design, erasure-coded for redundancy, and stored across 80 uncorrelated end-points. A file can be rebuilt by downloading any 30 of its 80 parts. This delivers cross-geography redundancy for every file at no additional cost. The platform's decentralized architecture also means that end-points have a greater geographic distribution, making it much faster to download from anywhere in the world.

"It's great to see some of the biggest leaders in the blockchain industry adopt Tardigrade to accelerate performance of their platforms and services," said Shawn Wilkinson, Storj Labs Chief Strategy Officer. "NEM's Symbol platform has the potential to drive adoption of blockchain technologies across the enterprise, government, and consumer spaces, and we're proud to have Tardigrade be a part of this solution.

To drive wide adoption of decentralized cloud storage, Tardigrade delivers performance on par with centralized cloud storage providers, while lowering costs by approximately half. The platform is also easy to start using, with a wide array of bindings for common coding languages and integrations with popular open source software tools, meaning migrating to Tardigrade is often as easy as entering user credentials or changing a line or two of code.