Mysten Labs's flagship storage project has been pondering the same challenge: how to balance decentralization, replication overhead, recovery efficiency, and security in storage solutions.

Traditional full replication schemes (like Filecoin, Arweave) are simple in logic, but require over 25 times the resources to ensure sufficient security. Erasure coding techniques later reduced this overhead to around 3 times, and projects like Storj and Sia are using them. However, this introduces new problems—recovery costs skyrocket, and vulnerabilities are especially prone to emerge in asynchronous network environments.

The Red Stuff protocol is considered to break this deadlock. It employs a 2D coding plus asynchronous challenge mechanism. Its core idea is based on linear erasure codes and the Twin-code framework, with deep optimizations for Byzantine fault tolerance. How does it work specifically? It splits the data blob into a matrix structure of (f+1)×(2f+1) (corresponding to n=3f+1 nodes, where f is the maximum number of malicious nodes). The primary dimension extends vertically to n symbols, with each node storing a primary sliver; the secondary dimension extends horizontally to form secondary slivers. This 2D design allows the primary dimension to be read quickly with a threshold of f+1, while the secondary dimension supports asynchronous challenges with a threshold of 2f+1.

The most ingenious part is the self-healing recovery mechanism—nodes that lose data only need to fetch row symbols from f+1 nodes or column symbols from 2f+1 nodes, with each symbol roughly 1/n of the original data size.