A developer of decentralized storage Storj Labs has launched a cloud service based on the blockchain for both enterprises and personal usage. It is intended for the secure storage of files and documents.
Starting this week, the users have the ability to start transferring and backing up data on the Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service. An open source network is capable of accommodating 19 petabytes that is equal to 19 million gigabytes. Currently, thousands of nodes, operated worldwide by enterprises and individuals, make use of the open-source network. The platform is today supported by approximately 3,000 customers.
“Decentralization has the various advantages for the cloud, whereas the first customers of our service can already experience how the decentralization upgrades security, privacy, and fault tolerance, as well as reduces expenses”, — said Storj Labs Executive Chairman Ben Golub.
While uploading a file, it is getting encrypted and divided into 80 fragments spread over individual nodes. If a single node is compromised or disrupted, only 29 fragments are required to completely restore the file. Thus, users are protected from a single node failure.
Co-founder and chief strategist of the company, Shawn Wilkinson, claimed that the Storj Labs would, first, determine a price that is two times lower than the price set by the centralized cloud storage providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS). Furthermore, the service has no restrictions on carrying capacity — the platform allows users to store as much data as they need.
In 2017, Storj’s service was relocated from Bitcoin to Ethereum. The co-founder affirmed that the company is not planning another relocation.
“Ethereum enables us to forward thousands of transactions every month to numerous node storage operators”, — co-founder said.
Customers who already use the protocols of Kafkaesque, Fluree, and CNCTED data warehouse management and, additionally, authentication solution from Verif-y, Storj’s partner; will have access to the decentralized storage via platform connector. The protocol was designed in a way to enable developers with experience in Amazon S3, Python, Go, and Android to easily learn how to use Tardigrade. Storj is not alone in developing and proposing solutions for decentralized storage. In the past month, the project of decentralized file storage, Filecoin, announced the postponement until the summer of the launch of its core network. Now, the launch of the Filecoin blockchain is expected in the period from June 15 to July 17.
