Quote from: meowzerz on April 21, 2020, 09:01:55 PM

Looks like even the main devs gave up on shift. From what I saw in 2018 onwards, focus was on the delegates and rewards rather than working on connecting it with IPFS. Seemed like they were going to be the next maidsafe or filecoin, but like them it just became vaporware. But unlike those, it at least had its own blockchain! Cheesy

Hey meowzerz,

actually the contrary is the case, the team managed to link blockchain and IPFS (see details about PHOENIX on the website). They modified the SHIFT core and introduced four new transaction types: LOCK, UNLOCK, PIN and UNPIN. These transaction types can be used to use your SHIFT tokens in order to claim storage of the decentralized cloud and host files within it - all verified by blockchain.

The team implemented it on the testnet first, the following link shows you a wallet address with pinned and lock bytes:

https://testnet.explorer.shiftnrg.io/address/17693497072772238783S

There was also a demo website to enable everybody to play around with it, but du to the transition of the project PHOENIX as well as the demo is currently down - both will come online again in the upcoming weeks.

Some further information about the blockchain integration (from SHIFT's progress report of late 2018, which was an outview for 2019):

Blockchain Integration

The Shift Project is building a platform with which users will be able to use the Shift Nano wallet to access the storage resources of others in order to decentralize their data and web hosting apparatus, as well as grant drive space to the network as storage providers by installing Phoenix. As the provision of drive space requires the deployment and maintenance of software and hardware, which takes time and money, the ecosystem requires a verification system and financial model that is able to monitor and reward participants for satisfactorily granting the services underpinning it. It is the presence of this model that allows the network to function in a healthy and sustainable manner, serving the interests of storage users and providers alike. This is where blockchain integration comes in.

It is blockchain’s ability to chronicle events in a decentralized and immutable manner, that we shall use during the process of assigning storage capacity on a distributed network, as well as the facility to proportion financial rewards in a programmatic and verifiable way, that we’ll use to reward storage providers, that makes blockchain so fundamental to Shift’s technology. The first step in blockchain integration to be included in our upcoming release, is thus the ability to LOCK tokens as a means of staking a claim to a proportion of the pool of available storage space, as well as the provision of a PIN function for assigning content the status necessary to render it censorship resistant. While not included in our upcoming releases, once storage space is acquired and content pinned, subsequent releases will add the consensus checking used to maintain the state where if one of the three peers responsible for the content’s pinning went offline, it would be automatically redistributed to a new peer on the Phoenix Cluster.

In order for a user to store data on our platform, it will be necessary for them to first acquire SHIFT tokens to stake a claim to the amount of storage space needed to host that data. Following this, those SHIFT can be locked using the Shift Nano wallet, and a small fee paid to pin that data permanently (or until the data is unpinned by the wallet holder). These two transaction types can also be conducted in the inverse, serving to undo the prior actions. Put simply, the four transaction types to be debuted in our upcoming release are as follows:

A LOCK transaction, that sends a designated amount of SHIFT tokens to a virtual wallet where they are stored as a form of collateral, guaranteeing the corresponding amount of storage space is available to the wallet holder.
An UNLOCK transaction, that returns the debited tokens and releases storage space back to the storage cluster’s data pool.
A PIN transaction, that creates a record on the mainchain containing the asset hash and asset size as data entries allowing only the wallet holder to dictate the data’s distribution across the cluster.
An UNPIN transaction, that creates a record on the mainchain that is read by the cluster as a cancelation of the relevant PIN transaction, and instructs it to free the user’s storage space, allowing them to grant it to other assets.

The whole report can be found here: https://www.shiftnrg.com.mx/2018/11/23/shift-project-progress-report/

just to provide some relevant and up-to-date links:

Website: https://shiftnrg.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ShiftNrg
Discord: https://discord.gg/fgzxABX