Storj, ‘Decentralized cloud storage that is automatically encrypted, easily implemented, highly performant, exceptionally economical, and ridiculously resilient.’ That’s what they say about themselves, anyway. But what does Inferno say?

Storj is one of those Old Timer crypto projects. Not as old as some, but it’s been around since 2014 and given that it’s still here, that makes it one of the longest-lasting initiatives around. It was first demoed in March 2014, at a Bitcoin hackathon. The team later raised around $500,000 in BTC.

After Ethereum launched the project ultimately became a token on the Ethereum blockchain. It has received VC funding and a successful second token sale, picking up $30 million in June 2017. Already in beta, Storj is launching properly in early 2019, which means that five years of work are about to come to fruition.

The idea of Storj is to decentralise file storage, giving the benefits of a conventional platform like Dropbox without the centralisation that puts files at risk from deletion, tampering or theft. It’s all encrypted, and the sharding mechanism means that files can be stored in multiple locations without overloading the blockchain – not every node has to store every file, but there’s enough redundancy to make sure you can always recover your documents. It works similar to Torrents, except that in the case of Storj only the file owner knows where their files are stored. A set of rules ensures that there’s enough redundancy, but not too much, which would be inefficient. Regular (hourly) audits ensure that all the pieces of the files are always there so nothing is lost.

Storage comes in at $0.015 per GB per month. You’ll find prices for commercial providers vary wildly, but that actually seems to come in at cheaper than most on a small scale.

Now, five years is a long time in crypto, and a number of other similar projects have arisen – distributed services (storage, computing, bandwidth…) are a big thing for blockchain. So does Storj have what it takes? We’ll find out in January, but with a large community of storage providers, it does look set to gain some genuine traction. You can find out more here.

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