Today our team is thrilled to announce our Tardigrade decentralized cloud storage service is finally ready for production workloads—we can’t wait for you to try it out. We’re welcoming the first paying customers to experience the advantages of decentralized cloud storage with an early access release (RC 1.0). We expect a complete production launch this quarter, at which time we’ll remove the waitlist and open user registration to all.

With this release, Tardigrade users can expect:

Full service level agreements: For both our early access release and our production launch, Tardigrade users can expect 3 9s of availability (99.9%) and 9 9s of durability (99.9999999%).

For both our early access release and our production launch, Tardigrade users can expect 3 9s of availability (99.9%) and 9 9s of durability (99.9999999%). 1TB credits for storage and bandwidth: All users who signed up for our waitlist will receive this credit after adding a STORJ token balance or credit card to their account. All waitlist credits will expire after one full billing cycle after our production launch, so claim them now so you don’t miss out! After users utilize their credits, they’ll be charged for their usage.

All users who signed up for our waitlist will receive this credit after adding a STORJ token balance or credit card to their account. All waitlist credits will expire after one full billing cycle after our production launch, so claim them now so you don’t miss out! After users utilize their credits, they’ll be charged for their usage. 1TB limits on storage and bandwidth: During this early access period, all accounts will have limits of 1TB for both their static storage usage and their monthly bandwidth. Submit a request through our support portal if you need to increase this limit.

During this early access period, all accounts will have limits of 1TB for both their static storage usage and their monthly bandwidth. Submit a request through our support portal if you need to increase this limit. Backward compatibility: Developers building on top of Tardigrade can expect their applications to have full backward compatibility with the general availability production launch.

If you haven’t yet, sign up now to get your credit before time runs out! If you’ve already joined the waitlist, check your inbox for an email with details on how to get started. If you’re already a Tardigrade user, first, thank you very much and second, your account will be credited with 1TB of storage and bandwidth after you add a STORJ token balance or a credit card. Users who have both a credit card and a STORJ token balance will first see their STORJ token balance charged, with their credit card as the secondary method of payment. Even after users exhaust their credits, they’ll still pay less than half the price of traditional cloud storage for their usage.

Over the past six months, our team has quietly been gathering feedback from customers pilots and POCs, as well as data from network stress tests. We’re confident our first initial partners and customers, as well as users who are joining from the waitlist, will have a positive experience trying out Tardigrade. As an extra measure to ensure the quality of that experience, we’re being extremely vigilant in balancing the network in terms of supply and demand. Over the coming weeks, we’ll continue to gather data and feedback from our initial customers. Once we’re fully confident we can scale that quality experience to meet the anticipated demand, we’ll announce general availability, remove the waitlist, and allow anyone to sign up to experience Tardigrade first-hand.

General Availability Release Timing

Between now and production not much will change in the system, other than a significant increase in data to be uploaded by our first paying customers.

We’ve previously talked about the qualification gates we use to ensure the product is ready to support our customers’ cloud storage needs and deliver a solid user experience, both of which are critical to drive adoption of the platform. We established these gates to guarantee that we delivered not only an enterprise-grade technology solution but also a world-class customer experience. Since establishing these launch gates, we’ve continuously monitored and reported upon our progress. At every major milestone, we’ve evaluated our progress toward the gates, and the applicability and validity of those gates. As part of this new early access phase, we’ve added an additional qualification gate, which is to deliver two weeks of success with real-world users (and their data).

Tardigrade Adoption During Beta 1 and 2

To date, we’ve welcomed 10,000+ Tardigrade waitlist members to the platform. There is more than 4 PB (4,000 TB) of data stored with 20 PB of available capacity. Thousands of developers have created accounts, projects, and uploaded data to the network. In addition to these developers, we’ve been working with a number of large, notable partners and customers who have large-scale use cases to prove that decentralized cloud storage is the right solution for their needs. We’ll be sharing more about these customer’s use cases in the coming months.

During this early access phase, we’ll provide an extra level of support to early customers and developers, gather further feedback, and continue to refine the onboarding process. We’re doing this so that when we actually move forward with mass adoption, we’ll be ready— and so will Tardigrade.

Early Access vs General Availability

Once we announce general availability, users will be able to sign up directly on Tardigrade.io, after which they’ll receive immediate confirmation for their account. During early access, we’ll be sending out invites once a week to continue to throttle new user registrations.

As mentioned before, those users that do have access will have their limits raised to 1TB for both bandwidth and storage after they add a method of payment. During general availability, limits will start at 5GB once a credit card is added, and limits will increase from there. So sign up now to reserve your higher limit for our production launch.

Our Storage Node Operators won’t experience much of a difference between early access and general availability other than a steady increase in the amount of customer data and bandwidth utilization on the network. We have a lot of upcoming features planned for the storage nodes including SNO board enhancements, configuration tools and improvements to graceful exit . We have some exciting news to share about our team building out features for Storage Node Operators on the Q1 2020 Town Hall, so make sure to tune in.

After our general availability release, we’ll share more information about our 2020 roadmap, but we’ve been very impressed by the amount of feedback we’ve received through the ideas portal and on the forum—we’ve actually incorporated many of the suggestions into our plans. If you have additional suggestions, please share them. We review every single suggestion. You can also see other ideas that have been submitted and the status of suggestions.

We want to give a HUGE thank you to our community of amazing Tardigrade users and Storage Node Operators for all your contributions to the network. We literally couldn’t build the decentralized future without you and your efforts.