I browsed the source code and all the local storage stubs refer to the datastore library github.com/jbenet/datastore.go. The README and the references describe it as an abstraction layer that would allow to bind it to any database format there is.

And then there is a link to level_db as one of the 'datastore' types in config/config.go:db.

I am really not sure if that abstraction layer is needed at this stage. Specific implementation of the local storage is not that important for minimum viable version. More than that, git, that other very successful DAG-on-top-of-data blobs design, implements and stores objects in a very opinionated way and seems to be successful in spite of it.

Is using that datastore library an intentional design decision? Can we just use something like github.com/syndtr/goleveldb at this stage?

Loving the project and the design, keep up the amazing work!