Doc ID: CE-FP-002
Status: Approved
Scope: Cascade retention sustainability with no user renewals, using diversified protocol funding and a phased endowment model to compensate SuperNodes for ongoing storage.
Non-goals (v1): Perfect byte-accurate accounting, fully trustless measurement, per-file endowment health tracking, retrieval fee economics, cross-chain endowment payments, or unconditional "forever" marketing promises.
Cascade Everlight transforms Lumera's storage economics from "pay once, hope SuperNodes keep your data" to "pay once, fund storage sustainably." SuperNodes receive ongoing, proportional compensation for retained Cascade data, funded by Foundation transfers, registration fee share, and Community Pool governance transfers at launch - with additional protocol-native funding streams (endowments) added in later phases once measurement and audit rails are mature.
The system ships in three phases:
STORAGE_FULL SuperNode state ensures disk-constrained nodes remain productive for compute services. A new cascade_kademlia_db_bytes LEP-4 metric gives the chain accurate per-node Cascade storage data. Everlight pool, distribution, params, and queries are added to the existing x/supernode module (no separate module). Registration fee share routing funds the pool. The Foundation operationally pre-funds the pool address before the upgrade lands.x/endowment module adds per-registration endowments, staked principal, and yield-backed N-year retention guarantees.Service-aware eligibility ensures that STORAGE_FULL SuperNodes remain active for compute workloads (Sense, Agents), maximizing network throughput and operator revenue.
SuperNodes are deploying, but the economics don't support them. SuperNodes incur real monthly costs for storage - disk space, bandwidth, electricity, hardware replacement. Today they earn a one-time fee at action finalization and nothing afterward. As Cascade adoption grows, this gap between front-loaded revenue and ongoing costs will drive operators to either quietly drop data or leave the network.
The longer we wait, the more unpaid liability accumulates. Every Cascade upload creates a perpetual storage obligation with zero ongoing funding.
Cosmos staking infrastructure makes this uniquely possible. Unlike Arweave (which relies on declining storage cost assumptions alone), Lumera can use Cosmos SDK staking to generate real yield from endowments.
LEP-4, LEP-5, and LEP-6 provide the foundation. Self-reported metrics (LEP-4) give us the storage utilization data needed for proportional payouts. Storage verification challenges (LEP-5) provide the cryptographic proof mechanism. LEP-6 (Storage-Truth Enforcement) upgrades challenges into compound recent+old subchallenges with node suspicion scoring, reporter reliability tracking, and ticket-deterioration-driven self-healing - making storage truth the primary enforcement signal. Everlight is the economic layer that completes the picture.