Storj DCS (Decentralized Cloud Storage) is private by design and secure by default — delivering unparalleled data protection and privacy when compared to traditional centralized cloud object storage alternatives, like Amazon Web Services (AWS). This innovative, decentralized solution encrypts, divides, and distributes files to thousands of statistically uncorrelated nodes and ISPs around the world. Decentralization delivers the highest possible levels of security and privacy for users who demand to own their data and control its use, integrity, and access. For example: decentralized data can’t be censored or monitored and its associated probability of network downtime is significantly reduced because it lacks a central point of failure. It is also resistant to tampering and ransomware attacks. By bringing decentralization to cloud-based storage, Storj DCS is able to deliver privacy and security benefits as well as providing inherently better economics than centralized alternatives.
Here’s how it works: Storj incentivizes two parties to use the network — those with extra bandwidth and storage capacity on their computers (host Storage Nodes), and those in need of this excess capacity (utilize Storj DCS). While anyone can use the cloud object storage service, the platform offers the most utility for developers, start-ups, and large-scale projects with high capacity storage requirements. The Storj Network uses STORJ token, an ERC-20 utility token, as an exchange of value across the network. The token enables Storj to send and receive payments around the world for minimal costs and no currency conversion fees. Payments with STORJ token also provide a fast, transparent, scalable and easy payment solution for customers.
Though early versions of the Storj protocol were blockchain-based, the current iteration of Storj does not utilize blockchain architecture. Instead, Storj comprises a global network of independent nodes and a peer-to-peer communications protocol which allows the Nodes to communicate. This means that, although the Storj network prioritizes decentralization and is somewhat similar to a blockchain infrastructure, it is not beholden to the transactional limitations of blockchain consensus mechanisms.
Storj’s Decentralized Advantages
Storj DCS has some notable advantages over centralized cloud storage incumbents. If you use Storj DCS for cloud object storage, each file is split into 80 or more pieces and distributed globally. As there is no central point of failure, catastrophic file loss is prevented thanks to a redundancy that’s built into the system. And, if certain pieces are lost due to a storage failure or a Storage Node leaving the network, only 30 pieces are actually needed to reconstitute the file. In fact, the network has never lost a file.
Additionally, Storj DCS delivers inherently more favorable economics than those offered by key centralized storage providers. As a decentralized service, Storj can crowd-source storage capacity for cloud object storage users while incentivizing Storj Nodes to join the network and scale as needed. And with no centralized data center overhead, savings get passed on to users. No exorbitant egress fees, complex cost structures or extra costs for multi-region that tend to lock users in all help Storj DCS effectively compete with the huge centralized data providers that need large capital investments in order to stay solvent on the sometimes slim profit margins of data storage.
Storj for Users and Nodes: An Overview
Storage Nodes can be thought of collectively as a decentralized data center. Nodes simply download the Storj software, advertise how much bandwidth and data capacity they’d like to offer, and designate a Storj wallet address if they wish to receive payment in STORJ tokens. The STORJ token is built on top of Ethereum using the ERC-20 token standard. The primary functions of a Node are to store and return data, both of which they are compensated for. Storj carries out random audits to ensure that Nodes are honestly storing data. If they are found to be acting maliciously, they are removed from the network and will not receive payment.
Storj’s Satellites
In addition to the storage providers and users, the Storj ecosystem also features data and security validators called Satellites. These Satellites play an important and multi-faceted role in managing, securing, and maintaining the network. Likewise, they ensure that Storage Nodes are acting honestly and that service payments are properly sent and received.
Storj Satellites are also responsible for storing the encrypted metadata of objects uploaded to the Storj network. This metadata shows where the pieces of a file are so that it can be reconstituted. While Satellites know the locations of the file pieces, Satellites can’t decrypt the objects themselves. They simply combine the segments for the rightful owner upon request. Satellites also repair and replace data pieces. If they detect that data segment redundancy is too low, they regenerate the pieces on other nodes. This maintains robust file redundancy even as Nodes sporadically join and leave the network. Additionally, when data is moved or deleted, Satellites notify the storage nodes that the data can be deleted to make room for other files.
Satellites also audit Storage Nodes to ensure they are in fact storing the data they claim to be. If a Node can’t prove that it has the data through this probabilistic spot check, the Satellite will take the Node offline and regenerate its missing data on new Nodes. Satellites also incentivize long-term and stable Node activity. A portion of a Node’s monthly earnings are held to ensure the Node acts rationally. If Nodes frequently go offline, that withheld amount is abandoned and used to repair the missing data.
While Satellites can choose to disqualify Storage Nodes for bad behavior, Storage Nodes can also stop using a Satellite if they feel that the Satellite’s payment and performance history is lacking. In this way, both the Storage Nodes and Satellites are incentivized to be honest actors.
Storj Hacking Defense
In addition to financially incentivizing all parties to act optimally, Storj is thoroughly protected from common network vulnerabilities like Honest Geppetto, Spartacus, Sybil, and Eclipse attacks. Another vulnerability Storj is protected from is a Hostage Bytes scenario, in which a rogue Node holds the last bytes of data hostage for a financial ransom. Storj has solved this by enabling Node and file segment dispersion. Even with a large number of colluding Nodes, this attack would be difficult to achieve as duplicate copies of the ransomed data would still likely be available elsewhere on the network.
If you’re a developer with data to store, try Storj DCS out today. Storj is offering a free plan that allows customers to store up to 150 GB of data across 3 projects. If you need more than that, Storj is more than 80% more affordable than centralized cloud storage providers.
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Note: Coinbase Wallet does not support direct bank transactions. You’ll need to transfer your crypto to Coinbase.com or send it to an external address in order to cash out.
Note: Only assets hosted on the Ethereum blockchain can be converted through the Coinbase Wallet mobile app at this time. Learn more about trading on Coinbase Wallet.
The Radicle (RAD) network is a decentralized platform that empowers developers to conduct peer-to-peer software collaborations. The network leverages a variety of open-source codes and a blockchain-based tech stack which enables developers to create permissionless Dapps in a more efficient manner. Notably, the platform continues to see growing adoption due to the time and money it saves developers across the sector.
What Problems Does Radicle (RAD) Attempt to Fix?
The development team behind the Radicle platform sought to create a self-sustaining, global, and permissionless network as a means to combat multiple issues in the market. Primarily, the protocol helps to promote further blockchain integration. The network enables programmers to create and anchor projects to the Ethereum blockchain. It also simplifies the most common tasks including smart contract management and access control features.
High Fees
High fees continue to be a major problem for Ethereum developers. The technical structure of the network is set up in a manner that congestion directly equates to higher transaction and processing fees. In the past, these systems helped to reduce spam posts.
However, as the most recent round of congestion isn’t spam-related, but rather, an influx in DeFi platforms, the high fees have had a negative effect on the platform. Radicle introduces a new system that helps to reduce fees for users and developers who interact with the network’s smart contracts. Additionally, there is never a membership or subscription fee users need to pay to enjoy these benefits.
Benefits of Radicle (RAD)
There are some really cool benefits that Radicle introduces to the market. For example, it enables developers to share codes without a third party. Enabling true peer-to-peer collaboration helps to drive innovation and improve the overall user experience across the market.
Open-Source
One of the core components of Radicle is its focus on all things open source. The entire platform was built using open-source code as well. Open source projects are recommended over their closed counterparts for many reasons. Primarily, it’s because open-source projects allow the community to vet their protocols to ensure there are no weaknesses, errors, or funny business going on behind the scenes.
How Does Radicle (RAD) Work?
The Radicle network lives atop the Ethereum blockchain. The protocol enables developers to create and integrate decentralized organizations and digital tokens in a secure and efficient manner. The platform combines open-source coding, community-led governance, and a self-sustaining network for software collaboration.
Radicle Orgs
Radicle Orgs allow multiple people to manage a group of projects. They empower communities that utilize Radicle’s unique features. The protocol encourages developers to create decentralized groups. Notably, there are a lot of tutorials on deploying Radicle Orgs for your DAO or development team. There are also modules and other pre-coded features that improve your success rate.
Radicle (RAD) – Attestations
Users can link their Radicle Identities to their Ethereum addresses directly using the attestations system. The goal of this protocol is to provide a global namespace to improve discovery. Radicle users can send their Radicle ID rather than their ETH account and add another layer of protection to their transactions.
Git
Radicle was built to improve Github’s collaboration features. The network takes advantage of the largest developer community in the world and adds new options such as peer-to-peer discovery to the equation. Additionally, the open-source nature of the project empowers programmers to make new interfaces and ways of interacting with Radicle’s combination of helpful features.
Radicle Link
The Radicle Link protocol is one of the core components of this network. This standard for code collaboration enables decentralized sharing without sacrificing security. Radicle Link is vital to the functionality of the platform as it helps to ensure the network retains its decentralization.
RAD
The RAD token operates as the main governance and utility token for the network. RAD is an ERC-20 token that resides on the Ethereum network. It serves a variety of purposes. For example, you can send RAD globally in seconds. You also must hold RAD to participate in the voting features of the network or to interact with smart contracts.
Radicle (RAD) – NFT Support
The Radicle Network offers DeFi and NFT users some features that are sure to spark interest. For example, the network supports the creation, issuance, trading, and management of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). NFTs are digital assets that can represent a unique asset in either the virtual or real world.
NFTs are quickly becoming the rising star of the DeFi sector. There are currently NFTs worth millions of dollars. These tokens are now more common than ever in the gaming and art world. Radicle’s developers can use NFTs for multiple services including the ability to fund new communities, sponsor initiatives, and as exclusive membership passes.
Governance
Radicle seeks to be a community-led project throughout its life cycle. To accomplish this task, the network introduces a community governance mechanism. This system allows regular token holders to put forth proposals and vote on vital upgrades to the network. Community governance systems help to keep project communities in sync. They also help to drive the value of the platform’s token higher since the more tokens you have and the more weight your vote holds.
History of Radicle (RAD)
The Radicle concept took flight in February 2018. The network was founded by two developers by the names of Alexis Sellier and Eleftherios Diakomichalis. Their goal was to create a more sustainable and democratic way to fund open-source public software protocols.
It’s Time for Some Radicle Improvements
The developers behind the Radicle project seek to make software creation more open and affordable. The network’s unique capabilities enable anyone to join forces with other developers in a direct peer-to-peer fashion. This approach reduces costs and improves transparency across the market.
These features combined with the ability to easily pin new applications to the Ethereum blockchain make Radicle a smart alternative for anyone seeking to create robust decentralized applications. For these reasons, Radicle is set to see continued adoption moving forward as more developers get hip to its excellent feature set.
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Note: Coinbase Wallet does not support direct bank transactions. You’ll need to transfer your crypto to Coinbase.com or send it to an external address in order to cash out.
Note: Only assets hosted on the Ethereum blockchain can be converted through the Coinbase Wallet mobile app at this time. Learn more about trading on Coinbase Wallet.
Livepeer is a network built on Ethereum for transcoding live and on-demand video.
Livepeer differentiates itself from traditional video streaming services like YouTube by not hosting, storing or distributing video. Rather, Livepeer is building a technology that utilizes excess computing power to more efficiently share video from broadcasters to consumers.
Video streaming is the main source of internet bandwidth use worldwide, with some reports suggesting that it accounts for up to 80 percent of global internet usage. The biggest cost for video broadcasters lies in transcoding, which is the process of converting and reformatting raw video to ensure it can be played across multiple devices and networks, from pocket size smart phones to larger than life billboards.
Livepeer aims to disrupt the video transcoding market by giving broadcasters access to thousands of distributed processors, allowing app developers to create videos within a secure, efficient and affordable architecture.
Central to its ecosystem is the Livepeer Token (LPT) which is used to secure the Livepeer network and coordinate the work responsibilities of those supporting the video encoding process.
When Grayscale, the firm behind the GBTC investment vehicle, announced in March 2021 that it was creating new trusts based on other cryptocurrencies, most of the newly-announced trusts picked were well-known, unsurprising cryptos such as Chainlink and Filecoin. But there was one new addition that seemed to catch even crypto enthusiasts off-guard: Livepeer.
Livepeer is an Ethereum-based decentralized service that aims to significantly slash costs for video streaming apps. It does so by distributing resource-hungry transcoding tasks to users who lend their computer’s processing power to the network. Like most decentralized services, there are incentives for network participants, such as the “orchestrators” who transcode video, and delegators who stake LPT tokens to ensure liquidity.
Grayscale clearly sees potential in the idea, but what’s it really all about? Here’s a look at how Livepeer works, how users can get involved, and how to buy its LPT token.
What is unique about Livepeer?
Livepeer is a decentralized service designed to minimize infrastructure costs for streaming or on-demand video applications.
It’s not a consumer-facing video platform itself; this isn’t a decentralized alternative to Twitch or YouTube. Instead, it’s a behind-the-scenes solution for app creators that distributes the task of transcoding video—or converting it from one format to another before playback—across participating computers on the network.
The firm suggests that it can cut resource costs by up to 50 times compared to traditional, centralized approaches to transcoding video.
Over 1,600,000 minutes of original content created and streamed on the @LivepeerOrg network in the last 30 days. Creators + decentralization is unstoppable! pic.twitter.com/P1FolIKVQx
Livepeer relies on its “orchestrators,” or people who have added their computers to the network, to handle transcoding demands from app developers as needed. These individuals trade their computing resources—CPU and GPU power, along with bandwidth—in exchange for fees paid out in cryptocurrency. Livepeer also calls these users “video miners,” keeping with the mining parlance used for the block creation work on many other blockchain platforms (like Bitcoin).
Developers who use Livepeer’s network to fuel their video apps must pay LPT for transcoding and distribution services. Additionally, LPT holders can stake their tokens towards an orchestrator to become a delegator, thus earning a smaller share of fees and rewards for participating in the network without being directly involved in the transcoding process.
Did you know?
The price of Livepeer’s LPT token shot up nearly 450% in the days following the announcement of the Grayscale Livepeer Trust in March 2021, according to CoinGecko.
What’s so special about Livepeer?
Video streaming is expensive for app developers. It’s one of the hidden costs that consumers may not directly see or understand, but those costs can be passed onto them in terms of service fees, increased advertising, or having their data sold.
By minimizing those costs through distributed computing, Livepeer may enable new kinds of video-driven apps and business models. On the other end of the equation, people can contribute their computing power and earn fees and rewards in the process.
What can you do with Livepeer?
Livepeer is not a consumer-facing service, so users who watch videos that are transcoded on the Livepeer network may not have any indication that the service was involved.
For app developers, Livepeer provides a potentially cheaper alternative to centralized services, trimming down computing costs to implement video functionality within their services. And for network participants, there’s incentive for plugging your computer into the network and/or staking LPT tokens to help ensure liquidity.
Did you know?
Livepeer has launched a “co-mining” pilot program with decentralized storage platform Filecoin, as of March 2021, allowing users to mine and earn rewards on both.
We are excited to announce that Livepeer is launching a co-mining pilot with @Filecoin to enable Filecoin miners to become Livepeer video miners. https://t.co/X2nuht1Qj1
Grayscale’s cryptocurrency-based trusts are exchange-traded investment vehicles designed to provide exposure to crypto for traditional investors. The price of each trust roughly tracks that of the respective cryptocurrency, and Grayscale holds a significant amount of each coin or token within the trust. Investors do not own any actual cryptocurrency by investing in a trust, but they can potentially reap the benefits of its increasing value.
By creating the Grayscale Livepeer Trust, the firm is betting on the future of the LPT token: that it will increase in value over time, and that investors will want exposure to it. As of March 2021, Grayscale owns $8.5 million worth of LPT, but the success and growth of its Bitcoin Trust is any indication, the firm could amass significantly larger sums in time.
Livepeer’s success will likely depend on its ability to scale to meet demand. If its distributed network can provide similar quality of service as centralized alternatives and do so at a fraction of the cost, then it could become a reliable option as Web3 apps and platforms grow in popularity. As of March 2021, it’s still a relatively small network, with some 47 transcoders connected to the network. Livepeer CTO Eric Tang tweeted in the same month that the service had transcoded more than 1.6 million minutes of video over the prior 30 days.
Over 1,600,000 minutes of original content created and streamed on the @LivepeerOrg network in the last 30 days. Creators + decentralization is unstoppable! pic.twitter.com/P1FolIKVQx
Livepeer eventually aims to become fully decentralized, but is currently steered by the legal entity Livepeer Inc. that founded the network. A 2017 roadmap that the official Livepeer website FAQ now calls “slightly outdated” offers a high-level look at how the network may eventually scale and gradually shed its centralized elements.
Decentralized infrastructure services could prove to be very valuable as the Web3 market grows and matures. Grayscale is betting that Livepeer will be one of the services that helps transform the streaming video market, and that vote of confidence may well help it stand out from the pack and bring in more app developers who want to tap into its decentralized network.
Chiliz ($CHZ) is a leading digital currency for sports tokenization, powering the world’s first scalable fan engagement & rewards app where fans can buy & trade branded Fan Tokens as well as vote in club-focused surveys & polls.
Chiliz.net is the world’s first cryptocurrency exchange for sports, allowing crypto-enthusiasts and traders to speculate and trade Fan Tokens.
What is the Token Ticker?
$CHZ
Will Chiliz have a public sale?
Chiliz raised all funds through private placement in 2018, meaning that there was not, & never will, be a public sale.
How much did Chiliz raise?
Chiliz raised just over $66 million through private placement in 2018.
Is Chiliz listed on exchanges? And if so, which one/s?
You can also buy $CHZ on Chiliz.net, the world’s cryptocurrency exchange for sports that allows sports fans and crypto enthusiasts to buy and sell official digital assets from some of the most recognizable brands in the sporting world.
What is the relationship between Chiliz & Binance?
$CHZ is listed on Binance, and Binance is also a strategic investor in Chiliz.
Can I work at Chiliz?
Are you passionate about sports? Or blockchain technology? Or both? If you think you’ve got what it takes to join the team, please check out our careers page here
What is Socios.com?
Socios.com is the world’s first fan influence and rewards platform that helps sport entities achieve digital transformation through blockchain technology. Socios.com is powered by the Chiliz token ($CHZ), both an ERC20 utility token on the Ethereum blockchain and BEP-2 token on Binance Chain. Fan Tokens are specific to a team or a club, and are a finite, digital asset that provides access to an encrypted, immutable ledger of voting and membership rights ownership. The tokenized fan-voting platform uses Fan Tokens, which operate on a separate permissioned side chain. The Fan Tokens are limited in number, and are fungible, meaning their ownership can be traded, and their price is driven by the market. The venture was inspired by the fan-led management frameworks or ‘socios’ of some major football clubs. Dubbed ‘Socios 2.0’, the platform simply represents the digitisation of this model of management.
Why would football clubs, esports teams and other gaming organisations partner with Socios.com?
Socios.com is building a global community of sports fans, united by their passion for the game and their passion for their team. Using innovative technology, we’re creating a closer connection between the fans and the clubs by supercharging the way they interact with their team. Through Socios.com, supporters are able to directly influence club decisions. From choosing merchandise designs, in-game banners, naming a training ground or even choosing a goal celebration song, fans vote through Socios.com and whatever the outcome, the club will honour the decision of the fans, all while earning rewards and once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Which organisations has Socios.com partnered with?
How does a team, league, club etc join the Socios.com platform?
If you’re a team/club or league and are interested in joining Socios.com, please contact us on partnerships@socios.com
Does Chiliz have any competitors?
Despite more and more companies entering this space, Chiliz is already more than two years-old, has a product, thousands of users and unrivalled partnerships with some of the biggest names in the sporting world.
How up-to-date is your whitepaper?
Our whitepaper is modified and updated according to business needs. The history of modification is always included on the last page.
How do you plan to use your advisors & shareholders?
We have focused on securing advisors who will help us to develop the business, design our products and services and to build our network.
Technological FAQ
Why did you choose to use blockchain technology?
For us, blockchain was the most practical and eloquent way to unite the needs of maintaining voting integrity and transparency with turning voting rights into an ‘ownable’ commodity. The Chiliz token ($CHZ), is both an ERC-20 utility token on the Ethereum blockchain and BEP-2 token on Binance Chain. The tokenized fan-voting platform uses Fan Tokens, which operate on a separate permissioned side chain. The Fan Tokens have a finite supply and are fungible, meaning their ownership can be traded, and their price is driven by supply & demand in the market. Fan Tokens are specific to a team or a club, and are a finite, digital asset that provides access to an encrypted, immutable ledger of voting and membership rights ownership.
Will the Chiliz token be ERC-20 and be available on the main Ethereum network (Main Net)?
Yes, Chiliz is an ERC-20 token, available on the main Ethereum network. ERC-20 is a token standard which describes the functions and events that an Ethereum token contract has to implement. Most of the major tokens on the Ethereum blockchain are of the ERC-20 token standard.
Ethereum blockchain is permissionless. Can it work for permissioned set-ups?
Ethereum supports the Proof-of-Authority consensus mechanism. Proof-of-Authority (POA) is an alternative to Proof-of-Work, which can be used for permissioned chain set ups. POA does not depend on nodes solving arbitrarily difficult mathematical problems, but instead uses a set of ‘authorities’ — nodes that are explicitly allowed to create new blocks and secure the blockchain. The chain had to be signed off by the majority of authorities, in which case it becomes a part of the permanent record.
How do you plan to develop the ‘Votes Token’ on the permissioned chain?
There are a lot of similarities between Fan Tokens and any cryptocurrency token — both are tokens created in an Ethereum blockchain for example, in the main Ethereum network for the Chiliz token and in the Chiliz permissioned sidechain for Fan Tokens. You can view the block explorer for the Chiliz sidechain here. But the similarities don’t end there — there will be a limited supply of Chiliz; they can be owned; they can be transferred from one owner to another; they are fungible; and they have a price driven by the market. For all those reasons, Fan Tokens are minted on the Chiliz permissioned chain.
Permissioned chains are known to be chains used by R3, IBM, and others. Is there a reason to make it a private chain rather than a public chain?
There are two main reasons. Firstly, a private chain is governed by a Proof-of-Authority consensus mechanism, which is less intensive from a computational perspective than Proof-of-Work mining, which provides security but requires intensive computation. POA consensus also provides lower transaction acceptance latency. Secondly, it solves the problem with the associated cost of GAS, if we had to record all the information we intend to store in the Main Ethereum network. In our sidechain, we can control Ether supply and use it to pay the GAS for each transaction at a negligible cost for the company.
Please let us know about the advantages and disadvantages of a permissioned chain.
A POA chain is more secure (an attacker with an unwanted connection or hacked authority cannot overwhelm a network potentially reverting all transactions), less computationally intensive (Proof-of-Work mining which provides security requires lots of computation), more performant (Proof-of-Authority consensus provides lower transaction acceptance latency) and more predictable (blocks are issued at steady time intervals).
How experienced is your development team?
Our team has more than 20 years of web and platform development including major gaming and payments solutions. We embrace blockchain technology, like any other technology we have used in the past.
Will you only focus on mobile, or web too?
The Socios.com platform is currently available for mobile users on both Android and iOS and a desktop version is currently being worked on. You can download the Socios.com app from here. The Chiliz.net exchange is ALSO available on both Android and iOS and can be downloaded from here.
Is it possible to disclose regular business and blockchain development progress?
We have always been very transparent in reaching our milestones, and sharing our journey with the community, whilst still retaining commercial confidentiality, and we will continue to do this. However, we of course have to be careful that the information we share cannot be used by potential competitors in the future. We also have regular updates on our Medium channel as well as regular live AMA’s by our CEO Alexandre Dreyfus streamed on our Youtube channel.
Is there precedent for having fan controlled teams and events. Has the idea been shown to work?
In conventional sports, as mentioned above, the notion of having a large number of fans either direct top level management decisions, or — going a step further — owning small pieces of the teams they love — has existed in many different forms. In fact Socios.com is inspired by the ‘socios’ or democratic management frameworks of clubs like Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, FC Bayern Munich and even the Green Bay Packers that are the only publicly owned franchise in the NFL.
What products support CHZ?
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Note: Coinbase Wallet does not support direct bank transactions. You’ll need to transfer your crypto to Coinbase.com or send it to an external address in order to cash out.
Note: Only assets hosted on the Ethereum blockchain can be converted through the Coinbase Wallet mobile app at this time. Learn more about trading on Coinbase Wallet.
SUKU is an Ethereum token that powers the SUKU Platform, a blockchain-based ecosystem that aims to make supply chains more transparent. SUKU tokens can be used for platform governance and to reward users and SUKU node operators. SUKU Platform is also developing applications for DeFi lending and NFT marketplaces.
Supply chains run the world, but they are becoming increasingly complex, functionally limited, solied, and in need of innovation. Logistics costs are deterring businesses, companies are faced with fragmented supply chains, and millions of fraudulent products continually find their way into global markets. These challenges also lead to more serious consequences affecting the globe, such as food sourcing problems and inhumane working conditions.
SUKU is a blockchain-based ecosystem that aims to make supply chains more transparent, efficient, and accessible by offering a supply-chain-as-a-service platform to enterprises and consumers. With its intention to enhance supply chains across industries, the SUKU Platform utilizes an on-demand, open software distribution model, consisting of applications and services that are used by SUKU Trading Partners and built with SUKU Technology Partners.
Imagine a digital supply chain ecosystem that enables transparency across partners, efficiency individually, and access to technology – SUKU plans on delivering this new model.
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Note: Coinbase Wallet does not support direct bank transactions. You’ll need to transfer your crypto to Coinbase.com or send it to an external address in order to cash out.
Note: Only assets hosted on the Ethereum blockchain can be converted through the Coinbase Wallet mobile app at this time. Learn more about trading on Coinbase Wallet.
Over the course of 2020 and the first half of 2021, the estimated 1,000 bitcoin — in the form of synthetic BTC derivatives — being used on the Ethereum network ballooned to more than 250,000 bitcoin as a direct result of DeFi’s meteoric rise in popularity. While DeFi first emerged on the Ethereum network, other blockchains such as Polkadot and Solana have gained in popularity and also serve as underlying platforms for many DeFi projects.
In response to this increasing adoption of DeFi, Badger was built to serve a growing need for the use of bitcoin in DeFi applications on these various blockchain networks.
Badger’s first product, Sett Vaults, allows users to earn yield on their synthetic BTC assets. Digg, Badger’s second product, is software that manages the DIGG token, an elastic-supply cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar price of bitcoin.
BADGER is an Ethereum-based token used for protocol governance and distribution of rewards within the Badger DAO. Although BADGER originally allowed holders to only vote on project proposals, it has since grown in utility and is now used to distribute rewards to those who manage the Sett Vaults.
Badger was founded in September 2020 by Chris Spadafora, Ameer Rosic, Albert Castellana, and Alberto Cevallos. When building its DAO infrastructure, the Badger team collaborated with dOrg, a company that specializes in building DAO-related software.
Among other accomplishments, Spadafora is the creator of the Crypto COVID19 Charity Poker Tournament, Rosic is a serial entrepreneur and cofounder of Blockgeeks.com, and Castellana is a cofounder of StakeHound. Spadafora and Rosic are currently part of the Badger operations team while Castellana and Cevallos have taken advisory roles in the project.
How does Badger DAO work?
Badger functions primarily as a DAO. Anyone who holds its governance token, BADGER, has the ability to vote on proposals set forth by members of the community. The more BADGER a user owns, the more voting power they have and proposals that garner enough votes from the community are put into effect on its platform.
Badger has integrated multiple DeFi products into its platform to help make bitcoin a usable asset across blockchains. The development team has partnered with other DeFi projects such as Yearn, Ren, and Curve to bring these products to life.
SETTs
Also known as Sett Vaults, SETTs are pools of tokens where users can lock up their tokenized bitcoin and allow smart contracts to manage their holdings to generate a yield. In other words, SETTs are Badger’s version of an automated DeFi aggregator.
When users deposit tokens into a SETT, they receive bTokens in return. For instance, if users deposit BADGER in a Sett Vault, they would receive bBADGER in return. These bTokens are interest-bearing tokens that represent the user’s share of the assets in the SETT and can be used as collateral in various DeFi applications. Anyone that deposits in a SETT will receive yield paid out in the appropriate token (based on the parameters laid out in that specific SETT) along with BADGER tokens. BTokens can then be traded back for the original asset along with any earnings (minus a fee).
DIGG
DIGG is a decentralized “elastic-supply” cryptocurrency, pegged to the price of bitcoin.
Digg’s software programmatically adjusts the supply of its DIGG cryptocurrency through smart contracts that expand or contract the circulating DIGG supply in response to fluctuations in the price of bitcoin.
If demand for DIGG is high, the price of each token may exceed the price of one BTC so the Digg protocol automatically increases the supply of DIGG to bring its price back down in line with the market price of BTC. If the demand is low, the Digg protocol automatically decreases the supply of DIGG to have the inverse effect. The process of programmatically adjusting supply to change an asset’s price is called ‘rebasing’ and is applied across all wallets that hold DIGG tokens.
While the supply of DIGG is constantly changing in an “elastic” fashion, a token holder’s proportion of the total supply of DIGG remains stable. In other words, if you held 1% of all DIGG tokens before a rebasing event, you would still hold the same percentage of coins after the rebasing.
DIGG can be used in DeFi protocols just like any other token, and can also be deposited into SETTs to generate a yield for its holders.
Founded as an open-source project in 2017, IoTeX is building the world’s leading privacy-centric blockchain platform for the Internet of Things (IoT). Their mission is to build a decentralized trust fabric for a new era of collaboration and data exchange among devices, applications and people. Backed by a global team of research scientists and top engineers, IoTeX combines blockchain, trusted hardware and edge computing to realize the full potential of IoT.
IoTeX & Internet of Trusted Things
IoTeX began our journey in 2017 to build the Internet of Trusted Things, where all physical and virtual “things” — humans, machines, businesses, and dApps — can efficiently exchange information and value at global scale. Throughout the past two years, we built IoTeX from scratch and devoted ourselves to delivering new innovations to the blockchain industry. This is manifested in Mainnet Alpha, which delivers a state-of-the-art Root Chain on which new Layer 2 chains, tokens, dApps, and businesses will be launched.
The IoTeX Mainnet serves as the origin for the Internet of Trusted Things. Our vision is much more than just adding trust to today’s IoT devices. Rather, by acting as a decentralized trust fabric for ALL physical and virtual things, IoTeX will drive end-to-end trust throughout the entire information life cycle, including collection, transport, storage, and utilization. This means data and assets can be shared by all types of “things”, enabling new decentralized business models involving humans, machines, businesses, and dApps:
Humans can seamlessly transact with machines in new sharing economy and data-as-a-service use cases
Machines can interact directly with other machines to power decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO)
Businesses can collaborate with other businesses to achieve new levels of collective intelligence and impact
Humans, machines, and businesses can access trusted dApps to perform various processes/tasks with full data privacy
The Internet of Trusted Things will change the world; however, it takes a special kind of blockchain to bring this vision to reality. IoTeX is the only blockchain platform capable of powering the Internet of Trusted Things. From Day 1, we made upfront design decisions to tailor fit IoTeX to support data privacy, trusted computing, large-scale IoT, interoperability, and big data use cases. By serving as the infrastructure to unify all “things”, IoTeX will power the new decentralized economy.
What is Mainnet Alpha?
Mainnet Alpha introduces the Root Chain, which is a robust foundation for future Layer 2 (L2) chains and dApps. As the manager of all L2 chains, the Root Chain utilizes Roll-DPoS consensus to guarantee security, reliability and transparency. The Root Chain provides P2P networking and consensus resources, which are leveraged by all L2 chains in the IoTeX Network. The Root Chain will allow developers to spin up custom L2 chains just as they would a new instance on Cloud! Cross-chain communication is also enabled by the Root Chain, which allows L2 chains to interoperate.
The safety-oriented Root Chain acts as a launchpad for various L2 chains, which are meant to be flexible and fit-for-purpose. L2 chains can be created with distinct crypto-economics and architectures to satisfy specific use cases: permissioned vs. permission-less, storage vs. micro-transaction focused, privacy vs. transparency-centric. The first L2 chain (codename: “AvoChain”) focused on privacy and trusted computing will be launched in Q2 2019.
Key components that have been released in Mainnet Alpha include:
Roll-DPoSConsensus: IoTeX’s in-house consensus mechanism is a variant of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), which delivers higher scalability without sacrificing decentralization or security. Roll-DPoS randomly selects 24 of the top 36 community-elected Delegates using distributed key generation (DKG) + BLS signatures. New Delegates are randomly selected every epoch (one hour) to ensure high security and hardware efficiency.
Ethereum-to-IoTeX Bridge: until the IoTeX Gravity Chain (governance layer) is launched in Q3/Q4, governance tasks (e.g., staking/voting) will be run on Ethereum. To facilitate this cross-network interoperability, we built a first-of-its-kind decentralized bridge between IoTeX and Ethereum, where the status of Ethereum staking/voting smart contracts instruct the IoTeX blockchain to perform Delegate swaps based on live voting results.
Extensible State transitions: IoTeX’s state transition component is designed to be extensible, meaning a subprotocol can be conveniently plugged in to support certain state transitions (e.g., confidential txns) without disrupting performance/security. As of now, there are five subprotocols implemented in Mainnet Alpha:
EVM-compatible execution unit: Mainnet Alpha uses Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is widely used by blockchain developers. Existing EVM-based dApps can be ported over to the IoTeX Network starting now!In the future, we will use EVM as a standalone execution unit for edge devices and develop an in-house IoTeX Virtual Machine, interpreter, and corresponding programming paradigms for decentralized computing.
SDK and explorer: to ensure a great developer experience, we provide the latest tech stack in the industry. dApps can interact with the IoTeX blockchain using our SDK (iotex-antenna) via gRPC. Developers can also create/unlock accounts, prepare smart contracts, and query the chain with GraphQL via our explorer (iotexscan). We use typescript to support type check and type annotation for ease of use and engineering quality.
IoTeX Native Token & Utility
The launch of Mainnet Alpha also marks the official launch of the IoTeX native token. The IoTeX native token is a utility token, which will be used in both the Root Chain (orchestration layer) and Gravity Chain (governance layer) for the following purposes:
Decentralized governance: staking/voting for Delegates, Delegate rewards and slashing, and network-wide votes/referendums (i.e., changes to rules, parameters, protocols)
Gas fees: running transactions and executing smart contracts on the IoTeX Network. One novelty is that gas fees are collected as a “tax” and then pooled/distributed to block producing Delegates
Bond/operation costs for L2 chains: to provision a Layer 2 chain, one must stake tokens on the Root Chain as bond and pay for operational costs. Each L2 chain may have its own crypto-economics and tokens, but will pay “registration costs” to leverage Root Chain resources.
Token Swap: Native & ERC20
The new IoTeX native token and existing IoTeX ERC20 token will co-exist for 3–6 months (until Gravity Chain launch in Q3/Q4 2019). For now, the ERC20 token will be used for staking/voting on Ethereum and will be tradable on exchanges (i.e., Binance, Bittrex, Upbit), while the native token will be used for running transactions and smart contracts on the IoTeX Network.
After the launch of Gravity Chain in Q3/Q4 2019, we will facilitate an official ERC20-to-native token swap via mainstream exchanges. Until then, options for token holders to two-way swap their tokens 1:1 include:
ERC20-to-native: leverage our Ethereum-IoTeX bridge to swap via smart contract — just send ERC20 tokens to an Ethereum smart contract and the corresponding amount of native tokens will be sent to your IoTeX address
Native-to-ERC20: use our micro-service iotex-tube — just send your native tokens to a specific IoTeX address, and corresponding amount of ERC20 tokens will be sent to your ETH address.
IoTeX Delegates & Staking/Voting
The IoTeX Network uses Roll-DPoS consensus, where Delegates are elected by token holders to run consensus on behalf of the entire network. The primary role of a Delegate is to help grow and maintain the network by providing robust node infrastructure, maintaining high server uptime, collaborating with other Delegates to run consensus, and contributing to various network initiatives.
IoTeX uses a unique staking/voting process managed completely by smart contract. As such, there is no centralized entity that can manipulate voting results — it is fully decentralized as all voting should be! In the IoTeX Network, 1 token = 1 vote and voters can also get bonus votes by setting a pre-defined stake duration (bonus curve). For more information on the voting process, please see our all-in-one Voter Handbook.
There are currently 50+ IoTeX Delegates from 20+ countries, including developers, community, media, universities, enterprises, and funds/VCs. Also included are experienced node operators from other PoS/DPoS networks, such as EOS, Tezos, Tron, Lisk, and IOST. With such a diverse, committed, and experience group of Delegates, we are confident that the IoTeX Network will be able to evolve efficiently and sustainably.
Voting for Delegates began on March 11, with a goal of having 20% of the total circulating supply (~500 million IOTX) staked/voted to bootstrap the Mainnet. This goal was met within one week, a testament to our highly committed community! With one week left until Mainnet Alpha, there are now >750 million tokens staked/voted (~30% of the circulating supply). If you haven’t voted yet, vote today on the official voting website!
The Future of IoTeX
IoTeX is and always will be 100% open source — an experiment in mindshare and collaboration, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The launch of Mainnet Alpha represents a new era of IoTeX, with community-driven development and teamwork as top priorities. We can’t wait to see what you will build on the IoTeX Network!
The Grand Design of IoTeX: Multi-layer Architecture
Mainnet Alpha is just a start — the grand design of IoTeX is a multi-layer architecture comprised of hierarchical blockchain layers with unique duties: Gravity Chain (governance), Root Chain (orchestration), and Layer 2 chains (operation/execution). Additional layers will be released throughout 2019, with the first Layer 2 chain in Q2 and the Gravity Chain in Q3/Q4. For more details, please see our post on The Grand Design of IoTeX.
IoTeX Roadmap 2019
As shown in our roadmap, 2019 will be an action-packed year for IoTeX. With a robust Root Chain foundation in place, the next steps of adding new L2 chains (i.e., trusted computing, IoT device hub), open source tools (i.e., SDKs, explorers, wallets), and dApps/services (i.e., DEX, stable coins, oracles) will involve the entire IoTeX developer and user community. Let us celebrate this major Mainnet Alpha milestone together and look forward to the journey ahead — let’s build the future together!
LCX, the Liechtenstein Cryptoassets Exchange, is a blockchain ecosystem for professional investors. LCX will provide crypto custody service called LCX Vault, a crypto trading desk called LCX Terminal, an advanced trading platform for security tokens and other cryptoassets called LCX Exchange, and an international fiat-to-crypto exchange called Binance LCX, which is a joint venture with Binance.
B.Industry
Cryptoassets exchanges are classified into two catagories: centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges. According to the data from CoinMarketCap on September, there are only 18 decentralized exchanges among top 200. Comparing to other centralized exchanges, the specialty about LCX is that they will offer trading between Swiss Francs (CHF) and Euros (EUR) against major cryptocurrencies pairs. According to the H1 crypto exchange report by Blockdata, there are 177 effective exchanges by the end of April 2018. Among 177 exchanges, there are not many of them provide international fiat-to-crypto exchange. Bitfinex, Coinbase Pro, Bitstamp and Kraken are the big exchanges that offer trading between Euros against major cryptocurrencies pairs. There is no exchange offer trading between Swiss Francs against major cryptocurrencies pairs right now. It is because there are only two countries use Swiss Francs, which are Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Switzerland does not have an exchange offer trading between Swiss Francs so far.
Although crypto exchange is a very competitive market, there is not many direct competitors to LCX. With the help of Binance, LCX has a potential to be successful in Europe. (7.5/10)
C.Mode
LCX, the Liechtenstein Cryptoassets Exchange, is a blockchain ecosystem for professional investors. LCX will provide crypto custody service called LCX Vault, a crypto trading desk called LCX Terminal, an advanced trading platform for security tokens and other cryptoassets called LCX Exchange, and an international fiat-to-crypto exchange called Binance LCX, which is a joint venture with Binance.
· LCX Exchange: LCX Exchange is a stable, scalable, and secure professional trading platform for utility and security tokens. LCX is designed to satisfy the strict requirements of institutional investors: custody, compliance, stability, transparency and auditability.
The LCX Trading Platform will be built on scalable infrastructure, matching engine and a secure backend infrastructure. It will incorporate the LCX custody solution, analytical tools and a variety of reporting capabilities. The trading interface will be available in English, German and Chinese simplified. Additional languages will be rolled-out over time. The LCX Trading Platform will be rolled out in several phases, first listing a variety of cryptoassets and at a later point of time listing security tokens. The listing of security tokens is in accordance to the international Financial Market regulations and will be launched after final approvals.
· LCX Terminal: The LCX Terminal is an advanced crypto assets autotrading, portfolio management and analytics platform with API integration of major exchanges.
· LCX Vault: An institutional-grade crypto asset vault using dedicated hardware security modules that support multi-signature authorization. LCX will offer custodian storage of cryptocurrencies for financial institutions, corporations, asset and wealth managers, family offices and HNW investors. The LCX Vault bridges the gap between hot wallets and cold storage. LCX will closely work with market leaders in secure hardware for storing crypto assets and implement their custodial solutions. The LCX Vault will provide clients with an end-to-end security solution and operational service, while allowing clients to maintain control of their private keys at all times. LCX’s advanced crypto wallets will be based on certified Hardware Security Module (HSM) technology. The hardware security modules will secure the private keys and manage the multi-authorization process.
· Binance LCX: Binance LCX is a joint venture between Binance and LCX, that will launch a fiat-to-crypto exchange in Liechtenstein. The experienced team at Binance will provide and maintain the technology platform, while Binance LCX manages customer support, legal requirements, due diligence, KYC, AML and government communication. Binance LCX plans to build up a team of 10–15 people for its Liechtenstein office and will immediately start the hiring process. The exchange will offer trading between Swiss Francs (CHF) and Euros (EUR) against major cryptocurrencies pairs, and add more trading pairs overtime subject to regulatory approval.
According to the telegram, there will also be $LCX, the utility token of the LCX ecosystem. Comparing to other exchanges, LCX provides more comprehensive service to investors, for both individuals and institutions. As a centralized exchange, LCX will face some trust issues in the future. Comparing to decentralized exchanges, centralized exchanges are more likely to be attacked by hackers. Moreover, since transaction data will not be on-chain, funds in exchanges are more likely to be embezzled (7.5/10)
D.Technology
LCX is a centralized exchange with its own platform’s cryptocurrency, just like Binance. As it was mentioned above, the experienced team at Binance will provide and maintain the exchange. Although LCX is not open source, people do not have to worry about the trading performance and security of LCX.(7/10)
E.Operation
Telegram — 2699 members, admins are always online to answer. Most people are asking if there will be ICO or fundraising; Twitter — joined twitter on February 2018, 96 tweets and 2249 followers; Facebook — 48 followers; LCX is a recent project, so it is understandable that they do not have many followers.(6/10)
F.Team
There are no members listed on their official website. But according to the LinkedIn, there are 5 members listed. Monty Metzger is the CEO of LCX. He is a serial entrepreneur that graduated from Harvard Business School. According to the LinkedIn, the size of the companies he had created is quite small which implies that his past experience is not that successful. Yeshu Agarwal, the CTO of LCX, is founder of Coinally.io. Coinally.io is the cryptocurrency auto trading & portfolio management platform featuring API import support for most major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Bittrex, Poloniex, Binance, Coinbase, Bitfinex, GDAX, Kraken, and Liqui. The rest of the team members is on marketing and community end. According to their job posting, they are currently hiring developers in New Delhi, which we can conclude that they will build up a technical team in India. The CTO is Indian as well. Like it was mentioned above, the experienced team at Binance will provide and maintain the technology platform, while Binance LCX manages customer support, legal requirements, due diligence, KYC, AML and government communication. So, with the help of Binance and an experienced CTO, the technology of LCX is guaranteed.
On advisory end, they have some big names. They have Don Tapscott, the author of “The Blockchain Revolution”, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and Prof. Dr. Shoucheng Zhang, the Founding Chairman of Danhua Capital. LCX has a quite luxuries lineup. (8/10)
G.Conclusion
LCX will highly likely to be the first crypto exchange in Liechtenstein. LCX intends to obtain a MIFID II license in accordance with the Liechtenstein Banking Act and further licenses under the Blockchain Act. While conducting its business LCX will take all required efforts to comply with existing Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations applicable in the regulated financial market. With the technical support of Binance, as long as LCX can operate lawfully, they are very likely to be successful in Europe.
Which products support LCX?
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Note: Coinbase Wallet does not support direct bank transactions. You’ll need to transfer your crypto to Coinbase.com or send it to an external address in order to cash out.
Note: Only assets hosted on the Ethereum blockchain can be converted through the Coinbase Wallet mobile app at this time. Learn more about trading on Coinbase Wallet.
OriginTrail is a neutral Web3 protocol enabling trusted data sharing between companies, organizations, and blockchains. End-to-end information is shared and secured in a fully decentralized knowledge graph network, monitored with AI and oracles. Connecting and searching vast amounts of linked data between organizations (such as in supply chains) in a verified way has not previously been possible.
At the core of OriginTrail is a decentralized network of nodes that share or hold data for a specific length of time. The TRAC token is the glue between all entities and is used as both a collateral (to keep data holders/creators honest and data immutable) and a payment (to compensate data holders for their time and resources). Sensitive data can be set to expire and is protected using zero-knowledge methods in a privacy-by-design approach. TRAC is integral to utilizing the protocol and is used in at least 6 different ways.
OriginTrail/TRAC is used by Home Depot, Walmart, Target, & the US Department of Homeland Security for factory audit verification.
Team recently backed by Coinbase/Twitter VC Greg Kidd and internet pioneer Bob Metcalfe (Metcalfe’s Law of network effects).
Adoption is catalyzed by building on globally recognized standards for sharing information and data. Together with GS1 (the global bar code registration body), they are developing the next generation EPCIS/CBV 2.0 supply chain standard.
Multi-chain technology strategy by connecting to Ethereum, Polygon, xDai and [soon] Polkadot. OriginTrail complements other blockchain projects and does not compete.
Which products support TRAC?
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Note: Coinbase Wallet does not support direct bank transactions. You’ll need to transfer your crypto to Coinbase.com or send it to an external address in order to cash out.
Note: Only assets hosted on the Ethereum blockchain can be converted through the Coinbase Wallet mobile app at this time. Learn more about trading on Coinbase Wallet.
OriginTrail is a neutral, open-source protocol enabling data sharing between companies and organizations. It utilizes decentralized nodes and an off-chain technology stack to interface with legacy systems as well as other blockchains (permissioned and permissionless). OriginTrail allows businesses to improve interoperability among systems and facilitate trusted data exchange.
Network Features
The ODN Mainnet has been operating since December 2018 with actual enterprise “data jobs” being posted by data creator nodes and stored by data holding nodes (continue reading for examples). The OriginTrail protocol and the ODN has been built from the ground up with four core features:
Interoperability and Data Integrity: OriginTrail has been built to take advantage of globally recognized GS1 and W3C standards. This allows for efficient alignment of data from multiple sources, including both legacy systems and newer blockchain-powered systems. This data could be anything: tracking and tracing data, Internet-of-Things (IoT) data, descriptive attributes, etc. Once data is aligned, consensus checks to verify datasets from different stakeholders can take place; additionally, auditing via compliance organizations can be authorized automatically. Due to the sensitive nature of many supply chain and business use cases, the ODN is designed to provide a “zero-knowledge” method to prove data validity.
Data Immutability: A tamper-proof fingerprint (cryptographic hash) of the data is generated and placed on the a blockchain when first published to the ODN; this is then used to verify that data has not been modified in any way.
Stability & Cost Efficiency: As the “heavy lifting” of interoperability and data integrity takes place off-chain, the OriginTrail graph database operates cheaply and efficiently. Its open-sourced nature enables easy deployment and does not “rip and replace” legacy systems as other blockchain-based supply chain solutions do.
Network Incentivization via Token Staking: As detailed in the section below, the TRAC token is the means of compensation between data creators, data holders, and data consumers. It uses an innovative staking system to keep all parties honest; nodes are therefore incentivized for performing consensus checks and delivering data on demand.
With all of these factors in mind, the OriginTrail Decentralized Network overcomes a significant barrier to centralized blockchain solutions: keeping trust between all parties on the network.
At the core is a decentralized network of data providers, data creators, data holders, and data viewers:
Schematic of the interaction between network nodes, enterprise connections, and the blockchain layer
Data enters the OriginTrail Decentralized Network through a Data Creator node. This data source could be from any number of business functions, including existing ERPs, blockchains (permissioned and permissionless), etc. A cryptographic data hash of the data is first fingerprinted to a blockchain to ensure data immutability. This data is then passed (via a bidding process) to 3+ Data Holder nodes that agree to hold the data for the terms of a contract. Data holder nodes are essentially decentralized, interconnected servers and provide that data upon demand to relevant parties.
The data can be treated exactly how the data creator wants. Data creators can set the data to be public or private, have the data expire after a certain number of weeks/years, or have that data (or parts of data) shared only with appropriate parties. Sensitive data is protected using zero-knowledge methods in a privacy-by-design approach. These data holding nodes also function as a vast, decentralized knowledge graph to connect data sets across companies and/or supply chain partners quickly and efficiently. This core feature of the ODN is one of the major selling points for protocol adoption, as searching for inter-related data between partners has not been possible before. This writeup on the decentralized knowledge graph is highly recommended to learn more.
Data holding nodes were designed to be very decentralized. They are open to anyone with 3000+ TRAC, and if the data job meets your criteria (job length, data size, etc.) then your node could be randomly assigned the job. All data holding nodes are equal; having more TRAC per node only means you can accept additional jobs compared to others. There are currently 800+ data holding nodes as of May 2021.
The ERC-20 Trace Token (TRAC) is the glue between all entities and is used as both a collateral (to keep data holders honest and data immutable) and a payment (to compensate data holders for their time and resources). More information on TRAC utility and economics is in the following section.
As the ODN is a middle-layer protocol, it has been designed to interact with a number of blockchains. While the data is kept off-chain on the ODN, the cryptographic hashes of the data are stored on a given blockchain. There are currently four blockchains supported, with a Polkadot expected after the blockchain goes live.
Ethereum: The Ethereum blockchain was the first supported blockchain supported by the ODN. An example of this can be seen here, which is the cryptographic data hash for this data job from the British Standards Organization. However, the rise in gas prices over 2020 caused data job prices to be almost prohibitively expensive. Other blockchains, such as layer-two solutions xDai and Polygon, enable much cheaper fees for data jobs.
HyperLedger Fabric: HyperLedger Fabric connections (in the form of smart contract integrations) was first achieved in late 2018. A recent example can be seen in this Oracle-developed usecase in the milk supply chain.
xDai: This L2 blockchain connection went live in March 2021. xDai was chosen due to the high maturity of the xDai ecosystem and production-grade/security audited bridges to Ethereum. It has been the workhorse blockchain for 2021.
Polygon: The connection to the Polygon L2 blockchain went live in August 2021 and jobs have been increasing in frequency.
Polkadot (via OriginTrail Parachain): The OriginTrail developers have stated they will be bidding for a Polkadot parachain slot soon after the network goes live. The OriginTrail Trace Alliance and Parity (Polkadot Developers) have had a partnership since September 2020 and OriginTrail co-founder Žiga Drev was selected as one of 6 project talks at the Mainstage of the 2021 Polkadot Decoded conference. Parity developers have also contributed to the OriginTrail Parachain codebase on Github, highlighting their collaboration.
Details on the exact timing/plan for parachain auction bidding have not been released as of October 2021.
Additional network utility is unlocked in the form of knowledge tools, where TRAC is used to transact knowledge from producers to consumers. It will be open to the entire Polkadot ecosystem. The developers have been working steadily towards this over several years, and the 2021 Expanded Roadmap suggests that this will expand TRAC utility by orders of magnitude. The roadmap is well worth reading for details.
Flow of data and TRAC tokens among ODN participants
The Trace token (TRAC) is the utility token that drives the entire ODN. It is a pre-mined, non-inflationary token, and only 500 million will ever exist. Fractions of TRAC (out to 18 decimal places) can and have been used on the network, so supply will never be an issue. This means that the price of a data job (which is paid for in company fiat currency) can be relatively stable as the price of TRAC rises due to utility and adoption. For example, a data job in 2020 could cost 50 TRAC for $2.00 (in fiat) while 3 years later could cost 0.5 TRAC for the same $2.00 rate. TRAC is an ERC-20 token and there are no plans to change blockchains.
Token Utility
TRAC is utilized on the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (ODN) in six ways, and the network (and its decentralized nature) cannot function without it. These mechanisms are:
1. Engaging in the OriginTrail Ecosystem. Data creators and data holders must have TRAC staked in their nodes to take part in the ODN. More TRAC staked in nodes means more data jobs can be published or held.
2. Publishing data to the ODN. Data creators publish data jobs on the ODN using TRAC to compensate 3+ data holding nodes for their time and resources. The exact value of TRAC for each data job is dependent on market forces, but parameters like job length and data size affect it. This TRAC is locked in a smart contract until the job’s completion.
3. Collateralization by Data Holders. To prevent data tampering and as a promise to hold data for a set period of time, TRAC from a data holder’s stake is also locked via smart contract for the length of the data job. Failure to provide data on-demand leads to loss of this staked TRAC to the data creator. Upon completion of the terms of the job, the data holder earns back their original stake AND the TRAC staked by the data creator.
Note that data holding node is not like a typical crypto “masternode.” They actively accept and provide data and are more akin to servers; most (all?) people run them on VPS providers due to the potential to lose TRAC staked (by failing to provide data if there is downtime). Some knowledge of a Linux environment is essential.
4. TRAC Usage as a Polkadot Native Token. As discussed above, OriginTrail will bid for a parachain slot on the Polkadot network. There will be a native token for use on Polkadot, which is like a “wrapped” form of TRAC. No new TRAC tokens are ever created, thus constricting the supply (i.e. the total number of Polkadot TRAC + ERC-20 TRAC = 500 million). A bridge will exist to allow easy movement between chains.
5. Staking TRAC. Individuals will soon be able to stake their TRAC on Version 6.0 of the ODN. Stakers will be able to get a share in the profits of the data job. This locks TRAC into the network for months and years, constricting supply. More information is coming soon.
6. Knowledge Incentivization. The final usecase for TRAC is through a data ecosystem that allows data creators to sell their data on the open market. For example, the recently announced EU-sponsored Food Safety Market aims to develop an industrial data platform for food certification in Europe by 2023. There are also Data Markets being built for both pharmaceuticals and satellite imagery; this has the potential to unlock valuable proprietary siloed data previously thought unsellable.
The OriginTrail Parachain super-charges these data marketplaces with the addition of knowledge tokens, knowledge wallets, the knowledge marketplace, and knowledge tenders. They allow individuals to buy and sell data in a trusted, private way; the developers say this will increase TRAC’s utility by orders of magnitude. Because this is tied into to the Polkadot ecosystem, all Polkadot/Kusama projects will be able to utilize this feature. Please see the 2021 Roadmap for a very in-depth look at this usecase.
The OriginTrail Knowledge Economy
Token Economics
Given the four components of TRAC utility described above, the price of a TRAC token should be well-correlated to the usage of the OriginTrail Decentralized Network. TRAC token scarcity (via utility) is subject to a “triple effect” as described in the 2019 OriginTrail Vision Paper:
“When the TRAC token economics and all of the above utilities are put into practice, they create a triple effect. When data gets published on ODN, the publisher creates a certain demand for TRAC that is used to compensate the nodes in the network for holding the published data. At the same time, the same demand gets created for TRAC that is put as collateral for that particular job. While that collateral gets locked, it effectively also lowers the entire available supply of TRAC, thus creating the third effect.”
One could easily argue there is a fourth effect, based on investors/speculators locking tokens away from the ODN. This further reduces supply and would positively impact TRAC price. A very comprehensive look at market forces and incentives of the network was also released by the team and is worth reading to understand more.
Upward price pressure on TRAC will happen in two ways (beside speculation/investment):
Token Lockup(by Staking, Nodes and Data Jobs). Token utility (discussed above) locks up a lot of TRAC in the network (per job) for months and years at a time. Reducing effective supply should positively impact price. The team stated in a September 2020 AMA that they expect to have 100k data jobs flowing over the network per day by 2023. Staking could lock up 20% of the total supply at the outset, reducing effective supply further.
Direct Exchange Integration. The developer-created Network Operating System (nOS) directly links existing enterprise software to the ODN. TRAC is automatically purchased with company fiat by directly market-buying TRAC on exchanges. This also solves the problem of mainstream companies needing to purchase and hold cryptocurrency. nOS is discussed in detail below.
Further, Alpha Sigma Capital, a prominent crypto venture capital fund, released an updated report in August 2021 that said TRAC is significantly undervalued, and should be priced at $3.53 based on their metrics. They expect more token price and team growth over the next 4 years. Alpha Sigma Capital confirmed they currently hold TRAC tokens.
Of the 500 million TRAC tokens, 358.6 million tokens have been distributed. Founder and team tokens (75 million total) were fully distributed by January 2020 according to the two-year vesting schedule.
The following table shows the current TRAC token distribution. As described in the 2020 Q1 Report, all of the TRAC available in the “soft lock” column will be used in the protocol development fund for future improvements (132.5 million total).
Updated distribution of TRAC tokens.
The following isa bit of speculation from a long time TRAC holder and node runner.
As discussed above, the token economics model is incredibly well thought through, with TRAC serving as a true utility token. Data job length varies, but node runners have seen job lengths as little as 3 minutes and as long as 5 years (average is 6 months). Each data job requires a lot of TRAC to be locked in the smart contract for the duration of the job: some from each data holding node for collateral and an equal amount from the data creator node to compensate each of the data holders. It will not take much to reduce the supply of TRAC dramatically, and there are numerous paths to enterprise adoption as outlined in the section below.
It is also interesting to note that when configuring any node parameters, the notation is always in micro-TRAC units (mTRAC); this suggests that “fractions of TRAC” data jobs were planned from the beginning and will be a common feature of the network. This would imply massive utility and enormous price potential.
Path to Enterprise Adoption
The OriginTrail Decentralized Network has been fully up and running since late 2018, and current job offers can be seen on the community-built network explorer, OT Hub. Since OriginTrail was developed as an open-sourced protocol for data sharing and supply chains, anyone can run nodes to create or hold data. The OriginTrail/TraceLabs team confirmed in the June 2020 Office Hours that there are jobs running on the ODN that even they do not know what they are. This shows that the network is being used as intended: a trustless, permissionless system to exchange data.
Nevertheless, there are a number of features and initiatives that will encourage adoption of the OriginTrail protocol:
TraceLabs
TraceLabs is the for-profit entity started by the same team that developed OriginTrail and serves as the core developers of the protocol. They are catalyzing the adoption of the OriginTrail Decentralized Network by developing custom solutions for companies (some examples of which can be seen below). The TraceLabs team has venture capital backing and have consistently said they have ample funding to continue development. As of October 2021, there are 25 members on the TraceLabs team (not including contractors and advisors). Their website currently shows 12 open positions. TraceLabs has a goal ofconnecting 100,000+ organizations to the ODN by 2023, as shown in a recent conference presentation. In a September 2020 AMA, they stated they hope to have 10k-100k data jobs flowing over the network by 2023.
The team has a number of high profile advisors; these include Coinbase/Twitter venture capitalist Greg Kidd, Electronic Arts (EA) games knowledge graph strategist Aaron Bradley, and internet pioneer Bob Metcalfe.
Network Operating System (nOS)
The biggest catalyst for ODN adoption is the development of the TraceLabs-built Network Operating System (nOS). This is a custom software solution for businesses that directly connects the OriginTrail Decentralized Network to their legacy system and other permissionless and permissioned blockchains (including HyperLedger). It easily allows for existing ERP integrations, consensus checks for data discrepancies among partners, supply chain/track-and-trace applications, and data/sourcing provenance. TraceLabs estimates that nOS decreases implementation time and deployment costs by 10-fold. Demo pictures can be seen on the TraceLabs website.
nOS is already integrated into several legacy enterprise suites,including Oracle Cloud, Salesforce, SAP, and Microsoft Navision. This enables 10,000+ businesses ready access to nOS functionality with a single click.
Further, and perhaps most importantly for adoption, nOS enables the spending of credits purchased with company fiat to directly purchase TRAC via Uniswap and other exchanges; TRAC is only utilized in the background, is directly purchased when needed, and used in nodes immediately (see this writeup for details). As cryptocurrency never touches the company’s accounting books, it solves the problem of mainstream companies needing to purchase and hold cryptocurrency to use the protocol. Because of this consistent buying pressure, it should create upward pressure on TRAC price over time.
Oracle and TraceLabs have had a partnership since late 2018, and nOS has been listed on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace since early 2019. The Oracle partnership also brought increased support for Hyperledger integration. https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NwYWNlX2NhcmQiOnsiYnVja2V0Ijoib2ZmIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1070678005763190784&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Forigintrailexplained.info%2F&sessionId=3c62e9633a0472adabd02299ebae9da1a132894e&theme=light&widgetsVersion=f001879%3A1634581029404&width=550px
Open Standards (GS1 EPCIS/CBV and W3C integration)
The entire global supply chain runs on standards developed by the GS1 organization. Systems to identify, capture, and share information among supply chain partners (including the ubiquitous bar code), were all developed over the past 45 years by GS1. These standards allow for interoperability between different systems and supply chain architectures across the globe. Any blockchain-based solution to improve traceability should integrate with these legacy systems, and the OriginTrail protocol was designed from the ground up to do this.
The OriginTrail protocol fully supports the GS1 EPCIS 1.2 and CBV standards in the protocol data structure. This ensures full compliance and integration with legacy systems. In July 2020, TraceLabs confirmed that they joined the 54 company working group to develop the next generation EPCIS/CBV 2.0 standards, to be ratified soon. This puts OriginTrail in an incredible position to shape next-generation intelligent supply chain interactions.
In August 2020, TraceLabs announced an integration of the ODN and the upcoming GS1 Digital Link standard.
The OriginTrail protocol also supports the Web of Things (W3C) recommended standard. This will ensure wide compatibility with IoT devices and has already been utilized for a number of European Union-wide use cases and pilots (see below).
OriginTrail/TraceLabs has been a member of GS1 since 2018, which gives them access to the development of supply chain standards and their implementation. OriginTrail/TraceLabs co-founder Žiga Drev was invited to speak at several local and global GS1 conferences, including the GS1 Global Forums in 2019 and 2020. OriginTrail was also featured in a 2018 GS1 position paper on blockchain technology. GS1 members are intimately aware of the protocol through these endeavors.
OriginTrail’s standards-based approach also caught the attention of the World Economic Forum (WEF), who detailed OriginTrail as one of the top blockchain-based supply chain solutions in their 2020 Blockchain Deployment Toolkit report. They also published an article on OriginTrail’s Essential COVID-19 Supplies Repository as an effective use of blockchain technology.
The Trace Alliance is a global network of 100+ business enterprises, service providers, developers, and research institutions that share knowledge gained using the OriginTrail protocol. They have direct access to OriginTrail knowledge resources, use cases, and the latest technology releases/solutions. The goal is to aid in the adoption of the OriginTrail protocol for the benefit of all members. Members include Deloitte, OneAgrix, TE-Foods, Oregon Tilth, and TMA Solutions. A full list can be seen here.
In September 2020, Parity (core developers of Polkadot) partnered with TraceLabs and will be part of a working group on decentralization and tokenomics.
Current and Near-Future Adoption of the ODN
The OriginTrail Mainnet has been up and running since December 2018. The following is a sampling of organizations that have used the technology on either the mainnet or testnets. It is not meant to be a complete list.
BSI (British Standards Institute)
The British Standards Institute (BSI) is the national standards body of the United Kingdom and has 86,000 clients in 190 countries. They produce and update hundreds of thousands of standards and certifications per year. OriginTrail and BSI have had a partnership since January 2019, and certification data from BSI is already flowing over the OriginTrail Decentralized Network (see example here).
In June 2020, BSI released a whitepaper detailing how the SCAN initiative (led by BSI) will utilize the OriginTrail Decentralized Network to monitor and audit factories servicing major United States brands in their Trusted Factory Blockchain Program. SCAN members (including Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowes, and Walt Disney) have over 18,000 factories that will be part of this initiative. This official writeup and the whitepaper are highly recommended reading. A video of how this works in action was also presented at the December 2020 OriginTrail Liftoff event.
SCAN members participating in factory audit initiative through BSI
In addition, BSI also trains and certifies 200,000 students per year on topics from business improvements to environmental management. The BSI white paper (and team confirmation in the June 2020 Office Hours) indicate that these certifications will be verified using the ODN over time.
EVRYTHNG
EVRYTHNG is an internet of things software company performing supply chain logistics for a number of global brands. These include Coca Cola, Ralph Lauren, Puma, and Avery Dennison, among others. EVRYTHNG has made a big push over two years for blockchain integration for their brands. OriginTrail has had a partnership with EVRYTHNG since May 2018 and a number of pilots by EVRYTHNG have made use of OriginTrail technology and testnets. These include:
May, 2018: EVRYTHNG partnered with OriginTrail and created an IoT/provenance connected “Barry the Bear” stuffed animal in advance of the GS1 Global Forum conference.
June, 2019: EVRYTHNG upgraded their partnership and used OriginTrail and IOTA to create a traceability solution using Avery Dennison IoT products and fashion brand 1017 ALYX 9SM.
EVRYTHNG recently streamlined its blockchain integration hub in May 2020, with OriginTrail still being seen as an essential partner for blockchain connectivity. In January 2020, CTO of EVRYTHNG Dominique Guinard also confirmed by a tweet that future use cases for EVRYTHNG blockchain integrations will be on the ODN mainnet.
European Union Consortia/Blockchain Accelerators
The European Union might be the biggest supporter of blockchain integration on the planet; details of which can be read about in this 2019 EU report. OriginTrail/TraceLabs is involved in at least eight EU initiatives and pilot programs in the supply chain space. Over time, this will encourage the adoption of the protocol by individual companies.
TraceLabs received funding from the EU to build the Open Provenance Knowledge Graph (OpenPKG). It will help organizations automate their GDPR compliance and have a transparent way of handling personal data; a use-case is currently being rolled out with the British Standards Institute.
Food Safety Market: Announced in June 2020, this project aims to develop an industrial data platform for food safety certification in Europe. This consortium is also part of the Trace Alliance.
DEMETER: A project that is building an interoperable, data-driven, and sustainable European agri-food sector using IoT technology.
LEDGER: TraceLabs is part of an initiative to create a Food Data Market for sustainable food production and data distribution. TraceLabs is one of only 16 companies selected out of 300 applicants. The Food Data Market has also gone global with the EU Commission’s NGI Atlantic initiative.
Blockchers: TraceLabs is part of a program for automation and incentivizing sustainable farmers using public blockchain-based technology.
Block.IS: TraceLabs is developing a laboratory data market as part of the Blockchain Innovation Space initiative, helping to contribute to lab and pharmaceutical safety and trust. They are one of 10 finalists entering the commercial phase.
PARSEC Accelerator: TraceLabs is developing a verifiable sustainability scheme for food supply chains based on satellite data. It will be part of its data market solution.
EIP-EKOPAKT: TraceLabs is part of a consortium developing a farm-to-fork traceability system. The first pilot will take place in Slovenia with the goal of other countries in Europe following thereafter.
Additional project information on these EU-funded endeavors can be found here.
Individual Companies (selection)
Perutnina Ptujis the largest poultry producer in Southeastern Europe and has had a six-year partnership with OriginTrail/Tracelabs. They recently introduced a QR code-based IoT scanning platform to track poultry provenance on the OriginTrail Decentralized Network. A demo video can be seen here.
OneAgrix is a Singapore-based online marketplace for Halal products. Two billion people in the world consume halal food products, and blockchain is increasingly a part of the certification. TraceLabs and OneAgrix have partnered to allow for halal certification on the OriginTrail Decentralized Network. Data has already been moving over the ODN and a live demo can be seen here.
OBE Organic is an Australian organic beef producer. They have been investigating OriginTrail technology for 1.5 years now. Public data from OBE Organic was recently observed on the ODN Mainnet.
AppsPro has a strong presence in the Middle East and is a Platinum Oracle solutions provider. AppsPro and OriginTrail announced a partnership to bring the protocol through the AppsPro network.
The Storj (pronounced as “storage”) platform bills itself as a decentralized file storage solution which combines the benefits of cloud-based storage and blockchain technology. At the heart of the project is the Storj network which, among other things, allows the users to put up their free disk space for rent. Users which are required to store files and assets online can access the Storj network and rent the available storage resources from the renters in this ecosystem (“farmers”). The payment is effected with STORJ tokens on the blockchain and their use is supposed to encourage users to become a sort of small-scale cloud storage providers.
What Is Storj Trying to Achieve?
In order to be able to ultimately challenge the dominant cloud storage providers such as Google and Amazon, Storj’s model had to be designed to meet several challenges.
Lower Costs
Current infrastructure costs incurred by centralized storage systems could be driven down by the decentralized model offered by Storj. With their focus on decentralization, the Storj team hopes to present its platform as an affordable cloud storage solution. By eliminating the need for running data centers, the cuts in costs promised by Storj should reduce the current prices offered by the centralized storage providers by at least 1/3. This is to be achieved by cutting the costs of maintenance, bandwidth and utilities via utilization of what the Storj team describes as underused storage resources existing at the network edge.
These are to be particularly beneficial for small businesses which need storage yet do not have the capacity or funds to build and maintain full-blown data centers, hard disk arrays etc. The end users would be able to pay for what they actually want to use, with no minimum usage requirements or setup fees.
More Secure and Private Storage
The storage model proposed by Storj would operate in the manner similar to that of the internet itself, in the sense that there will be no control by a single entity over billions of devices in use. According to the Storj developers, the decentralization of the internet did not reach the management of data that come through it. Actually, these data are rather centralized and entrusted for storage to several global providers running a network of data centers. This comes with a variety of risks, including data breaches, global interruptions in the provision of services and higher storage costs.
Bytom aims to take on the popular cloud storage services such as Google Drive and Dropbox by reducing its reliance on the bandwidth or electricity resources available to data centers. It will offer temporary storage of large files which can be shared or distributed as part of point-to-point transfers.
Security and privacy would be ensured by the end-to-end encryption by which only the owners of files would be given access to their data, instead of having the companies exhibit full control over their documents. At the same time, the global distribution of files offered by Storj is also promoted as a more reliable solution compared to more centralized storage.
Better Scaling
In an age of rising demand for data storage resources, the Storj network promises more flexible scaling model. Storing exabytes of data can be challenging at the time when whole economies rely on their effective use. The Storj team went on to design a network which promises to meet the demand for faster data storage and larger formats, while leaving enough room to be eventually expanded in line with popular demand. With the help of its sharding technology, encryption and data distribution across the nodes, the Storj hopes to beat the traditional on-premise storage systems and offer better performance and reliability across the board.
Storj also wants to establish itself as the media transfer and backup platform. Going beyond the commercial cloud storage, the Storj developers are working on offering additional services for its platform. Its long-term storage support should make it suitable for the creation of archives and storage of backup and recovery files for regulatory or compliance purposes. At the same time, Storj wants to become a general-purpose media content delivery platform, with the support for the storage of large amounts of video, audio, photo and other files. They will be available for concurrent downloads based on their segmented and distributed nature.
How Does Storj Work?
Working out the manner in which the Storj network operates starts with its apparent similarity with the torrent technology. Torrents operate as peer-to-peer networks on which each stored file is split into numerous small segments which are then distributed to the users. The users both store and keep copies of the same file. A person desiring a copy sends a request to the network, in the hope of receiving fragments of the desired file from the users who have it (“seeds”). Finally, the torrent client software compiles the file pieces from different seeders and recreates the original file. A similar system is employed on the Storj network:
The process of division of files on the Storj network is called file sharding. Instead of sourcing an entire file from a single source, the Storj network will allow the user to download fragments of the desired file from several sources at the same time. This decentralized file transfer system should allow Storj to present itself as a faster downloading solution compared to other storage providers.
By breaking the files into pieces or shards, Storj removes the possibility of a single organization or company having access to complete files. While the torrents publish information on file pieces publicly, only the uploaders remain in the know regarding the location of files on the Storj. In this manner, the Storj wants to promote protection of privacy of the parties involved in the file transfer process.
Locating the shards of the original file on the Storj platform is the task of its distributed hash table technology of Kademlia.
Redundancy and Deletion Systems on Storj
The sharding system implemented by Storj faces several risks which the developers had to counter with the appropriate technologies. Knowing that file pieces are distributed to various computers on the Storj platform, the users may rightfully wonder what happens after some users decide to stop using Storj or shut down their systems for any reason. In order to prevent the lack of access to desired shards, the Storj platform has implemented a redundancy system on its network:
This system is based on the use of so-called parity shards. Storj will help the users determine the strength of the redundancy for each file they upload and create parity shards. Based on this, the system is supposed to shield the network from the unwanted loss of files.
Yet, the parity shard system can hardly function as a water-proof solution in the long run, when the loss of files becomes more likely with passing time. The Storj developers hope to counter this by organizing periodic audits and checkups of the network, while advising the users to do the same for their files whenever they want to reupload them.
At the same time, there are some concerns that Storj’s redundancy system might cause the network to become sluggish. In order to prevent this, the network has come up with a set of rules governing the deletion of files which get duplicated too many times as part of the redundancy system.
File Protection on Storj
One of the key differences separating the Storj network from torrent-based systems is the encryption of each piece of the desired file. This system was put into place to lower the risks of users getting unauthorized access to the files which are distributed as part of the platform’s sharding system:
The possibility that the users who have the file pieces may get insights into the content of shards may be problematic for those who feel that this may compromise sensitive information. This is the point at which the Storj calls upon its “tenants” or file uploaders to both compress and encrypt the files before submitting them to the sharding system. Encrypting is done by assigning a unique key to a single file.
Since the data gets encrypted with the user’s private key on their own device, the data hosts or “farmers” are prevented from knowing what a complete file actually contains. Instead of this, they will receive a piece of a larger file which has been encrypted and thus made unusable unless they get their hands on both the encryption key and the remaining shards.
Potential hackers wanting to gain illicit access to a desired file would have to find all of its shards, which is hardly possible without the private key. Unless they manage to somewhat persuade farmers to send their shards and steal the key from the tenant, they will be arguably powerless against this system.
What is the Storj Bridge System?
Being central to the platform’s decentralization and security efforts, the Storj’s network of tenants and private keys needs to be flexible enough to meet potential changes in the current technological landscape. One of the trends which may have an impact on the underlying Storj system is the tendency of users to switch their devices every now and then. Considering that the tenants have their encryption keys stored on local devices which may get changed, the Storj developers had to come up with the Bridge server architecture to account for the situations in which the users do not need to access files from the same device.
With that in mind, the Storj team went to develop and implement the Bridge server technology. It allows for the secure storage of the encryption keys on a dedicated server which holds the relevant metadata.. The Storj team hopes to see this technology implemented alongside the future file sharing system, as the identity verification and storage would both take place in the cloud.
Role of STORJ Token
The Storj token (STORJ) is the currency with which the payment operations on the Storj platform are managed. Fees paid by tenants are turned into funds which the farmer receive for providing both the storage and bandwidth resources to the main platform.
In order to make sure the payments reach the right address, the Storj requires farmers to verify the existence of shards which are sent to them. The Storj maintains a file audit and verification system which involves sending a request to farmers to which they need to respond. This system is called the Proof of Retrievability and relies on sending a Merkle challenge to the farmers on an hourly basis. They will be able to provide answers only if the shards kept on hard drives remain intact and free from tampering.
In case they attempt to modify or delete the file in question, all payments will be automatically stopped. To expand the existing system with additional incentives to play fairly, the Storj team will work towards establishing a dedicated reputation system for its farmer nodes. In 2018, the Storj network has been estimated to have around 40k active farmer nodes.
As of March 2019, the market cap for Storj stood at just above USD 30 million. More than 135 million tokens have been in circulation in the same period, out of the planned supply of 425 million units. While the Storj Labs company pre-mined its entire supply of tokens, the tokens can be acquired either by becoming a farmer or via trading on cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, Bittrex and others. STORJ is usually traded in combination with Bitcoin, Ether, Tether and other currencies. Since the STORJ is based on Ethereum, ERC-20 wallets are a suitable option for storing the acquired tokens.
Storj Team and Competitors
The Storj open source project was started in 2014, while the ICO took place in May 2017. The project shares the name with the Storj Labs company which is headed by the founder and CSO Shawn Wilkenson, Ben Golub (executive chairman) John Quinn (co-founder) and Philip Hutchins (CTO and principal architect). The core team has about 45 members with various professional backgrounds ranging from Bitcoin mining to managing startups.
In addition to cloud storage providers such as Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive, the main competitors of Storj include Siacoin, as yet another decentralized cloud storage platform, Filecoin and MaidSafe Coin.
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