Storj, the platform for decentralized data storage, today announced that Ben Golub is joining as Interim CEO and Executive Chairman. Golub was CEO of Docker from the early days and stepped down last year. Docker is a hugely successful containerization tool that enables developers to compartmentalize applications on a server, so landing Golub represents a massive vote of confidence in Storj.
The cloud storage provider operates without its own data center. Instead, files are hosted by individuals and organizations who rent out their excess hard drive capacity. Both parties benefit as the users pay a much lower price for the storage and the machine operators, called ‘farmers’, earn money. There are 150,000 decentralized storage nodes.
Benefits
Apart from the monetary aspects, Storj claims to have three advantages:
- Reliability – in a typical example a file is stored in pieces spread over 84 nodes, and to lose the data more than half of those nodes would have to fail.
- Security – there is no centralized server to be hacked. “Storj is like spreading encrypted sand on an encrypted beach” according to one security expert.
- Performance – for some workloads with large files, multiple nodes means files can be delivered in parallel, reducing bottlenecks. Though it’s likely performance could be worse in other scenarios.
History
Storj was founded in 2014, making it one of the older blockchain startups, and started earning money in 2016 though on a small scale. It’s had two ICOs, one in 2014 and another for $30m in May 2017. Currently the token has a market capitalization of $135m.
The storage prices on Storj are quoted in dollars, and users have the option of using STORJ tokens or dollars. The charge is 1.5cents per GB per month for storage (Amazon S3 charges 2.3cents) and 5cents per GB of bandwidth (Amazon S3 charges 9cents with first 1GB free).
Competition
The decentralized storage area is a popular space with several players. The highest profile is Filecoin, partly because of the association with AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant but mainly because it had a $200m ICO.
Other competitors include MaidSafe and Sia, and arguably VideoCoin which is more specialized. They all compete with DropBox which is about to IPO and set its price range today. While they don’t represent an immediate threat to DropBox, because it has a massive base of applications that are already integrated, within a year or two they could have an impact. Already Storj is integrated with FileZilla, the most widely used file transfer program.
