The Data Challenge

Growth Reality

High message throughput creates a storage scaling challenge. At maximum capacity, yearly data growth can reach ~84 TB:

Metric	Conservative	Maximum
Daily messages	10 million	~230 million
Avg message size	~1 KB	~1 KB
Daily growth	~10 GB	~230 GB
Yearly growth	~3.6 TB	~84 TB

Traditional archive nodes store everything. That works for Bitcoin (~500 GB total). Not for a message-heavy chain.

The Trilemma

1. Decentralization: Many operators, not just data centers

2. Completeness: All history available

3. Accessibility: Low barrier to participate

Pick two? No, Obsidian solves this with sharding.

Solutions

Option 1: Full Archives

Store everything. High hardware requirements. Fewer operators but complete redundancy.

Option 2: Sharded Archives

Store epoch ranges. Lower requirements. More operators, coordinated coverage.

Option 3: Hybrid

Some full archives + many sharded archives = best of both.

Economic Incentive

Archive incentives are implementation-defined and may evolve.

The chain configuration includes:

• archiveFeeShare: 50% of PM fees destined for archive pool

• archivePoolAddr: Well-known archive pool contract address

Note: In the current implementation, PM bids are burned. Archive fee distribution will be enabled in a future upgrade.

The economics scale with usage.