Storj Labs officially announced the beta release of their cloud platform. which will allow users to store data on a decentralized network. According to Storj Labs, the Beta is only accessible through an invite system and will be available publicly after the platform’s initial testing phase.

“The long wait for our community is now over! We are delighted to release our beta platform to our community and see real world applications of the technology.” stated Shawn Wilkinson, CEO of Storj Labs.

With cloud storage going mainstream, companies have gained an interest in blockchain technology as a new way of storing data. Even Microsoft has started to add Blockchain as a Service or BaaS to its Azure cloud platform, such as Ethereum and recently added Storj as well.

Buterin comments

Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum commented on Storj’s potential in the cloud industry: “Distributed file storage systems like Storj have the potential to eliminate high markup costs and market inefficiencies and provide a much higher level of privacy, reliability and quality of service than we see today.”

While Storj users can rent storage space for around $0.015 per GB per month and $0.05 for bandwidth per GB, Storj offers both end-to-end encryption for all data being transferred and the speed of peer-to-peer blockchain technology. Since all data is shared, anyone that is retrieving a file from the cloud will not endure sluggish download speeds which could limit or jeopardize productivity since the network is decentralized and not hosted in a single location.

Storjcoin

Storj even has its own Counter-party token known as Storjcoin which will be given to “farmers” who rent out their spare disk space to the decentralized network. A total supply of 500,000,000 Storjcoin X (SJCX) were sold in a crowdsale back in 2014 and can be traded on the Counter-Party wallet exchange with a price of roughly $0.09 according to CoinMarketCap.

Originally an open-source project on Github, Storj has grown over the years thanks to a number of generous developers who contributed to developing, testing and troubleshooting the code for the intricate blockchain-hosted storage solution.