In between all the security breaches, hacks and data losses of centralized entities that we’ve heard of lately, there’s a quiet movement growing set to replace the centralized nature of the current cloud technology with a decentralized one. Decentralization mitigates the risk of data failures and outages, and at the same time increases security, performance, and privacy of object storage.

In this article, I am comparing two very promising projects based on blockchain technology, both with the potential to disrupt the centralized cloud storage industry.

I am talking about Storj and 0chain. Let’s examine the basic characteristics of both projects.

Both Storj and 0chain are permissionless ledgers with a global distribution of nodes in the network. This means that the nodes (i.e. computers running software to confirm transactions on the network) are free to join and leave at any time without any centralized entity giving them permission to do so. While 0chain is weeks away from launching its Alphanet, and a few months away from the Mainnet, Storj already has a very decentralized network, currently running about 150.000 nodes globally in their Alphanet.

Because of the decentralized nature, both networks are very resilient to DDOS attacks and takeover threats. Again Storj, in theory, might have a slight upper hand because of the larger decentralization aspect, meanwhile, this is something that can be configurable within the scope of 0chain’s configurable self-forking chains.

From the ideology perspective, things are bound to be similar as both projects aim to develop technology capable of decentralized cloud storage with similar or better capabilities than their centralized competitors. However, Storj and 0chain begin to diverge when we drill down into the details, primarily on the protocol level, favorable economic incentives for both service providers and end users.

Let’s examine where Storj and 0chain diverge.