STORJ - Decentralized Cloud Storage on the Ethereum Network [ cryptocurrency n°14 ]

What is Storj?

Storj began as a DAPP on the counterparty platform back in 2014 trading under the symbol STJCX.
Three years later and the the team successfully completed an ICO funding of $30 million to port the coin over to the Ethereum platform trading under STORJ, not an easy task by any standard and displays the development teams progressive and hard working ethos.

Storj is set to alter how the world does cloud storage with the Ethereum network as their leg up vs other cloud storage solutions such as Maidsafe,Filecoin and Siacoin with likely competition on the same network coming from Golem and iEx.ec who are targeting different demographics such as image rendering and financial calculations with Storj focusing on big data solutions and the average consumer.

How does Storj Work?

Utilizing blockchain functionality, a peer to peer network and client side encryption Storj:

• Eliminates the need for third party storage providers.
• Increases network security privacy and data control.
• Has no single point of failure.
• Enables a network of users "farmers" to provide storage and bandwidth through maintaining nodes.
• Users provide the data for encryption to the network which is broken up into equal parts called "shards".
• Shards are spread across nodes in the network with pointers to locations on Ethereum's merkle tree,stored on an off-chain server managed by Storj.
• To access data, a transaction is initiated that scans the merkle tree verifying the identity of both parties, de-encrypting and resembling data then providing to the owner.
• Storj's server is centralized but an attack would be pointless as without the private key, it is not possible to de-encrypt data.

Benefits over traditional cloud storage.

• Reduced overheads and maintenance since large data centers are not needed.
• Obsoletes hardware redundancy.
• Can mirror shards on existing nodes easily for quick access at little cost.
• Data contained on a centralized server is vulnerable to attack from the inside and the outside, the nature of distributing shards in parts across multiple makes it difficult to find the parts of the same file and as the network grows further bolsters the difficulty in anyone matching different shards would a node be compromised.

Why the change to Ethereum?

• Counterparty transaction confirmation time of 10 minutes vs Ethereum's 10 seconds provides ease of scaling.
• Storj's growth on Counterparty had seen profit margins drop significantly for farmers running nodes Ethereum's smart contract functionality mitigates cost.
• The estabilshed network of develpoers and users on ethereum will further increase Storj's possibilty of fast growth.

How big is Storj?

Storj has already has estabilshed a strong user base with 25k users being serviced by 18K farmers with a network capacity of 8 petabytes of storage with about 450 GB a node.

Market Summary

Research carried by marketsandmarkets.com has forecast a potential growth in global cloud storage of $51 billion up from $21.76 billion in 2016 and set to reach $74.94 Billion by 2021 having a Compound Annual Growth Rate(CAGR) of 25.8%.

The most growth will be seen in the Asia-Pacific and Russia with the already established markets in the U.S seeing little growth having being the top performer in global cloud storage in 2016 with the likes of Amazon, Dropbox and Google.

Mike Quindazzi of PWC Multinational Professional Services Network stated in a recent post on Twitter that 2018 is set to be a tipping point for global storage for all based on recent surveys.

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This leaves a lot of room for growth in Storj with the current price of $1.06 a coin with a market cap of around $81 million.

Who is behind Storj?

A large team consisting of :

• 14 developers with transparent github accounts.
• 12 community leaders providing much information to the public and helping to promote.
• Multiple advisers including but not limited to Venture Capitlists Tyler Scriven and Michael Cohn.
• Ceo of Minio Ananad Babu Perisamy
• Former federal reserve economist Warren Weber

Storj Labs Board

• Tome Boshevski, Chief design officer
• Philip Hutchins, Chief technology officer
• John Quinn, Chief development officer
• Shawn Wilkinson, Chief strategy officer
• Currently Recruiting CEO and Industry Leader

Conclusion

A combination of global demand for cloud storage, the low operating costs, ease of scalability on Ethereum, the high level of security provided and a strong development team, expect Storj to establish itself as one of the top data storage providers in 2018 and in the near future.