The Data Challenge

Growth Reality

Obsidian is designed for high message throughput:

Metric	Value
Daily messages	9+ million (target)
Avg message size	~1 KB
Daily growth	~9 GB
Yearly growth	~3.3 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

70% of PMQ fees fund archive operators. More messages = more fees = more archives = better coverage.

The economics scale with usage.