Storj Town Hall Concludes

With the most recent Storj town hall event complete, it looks like the Storj team is making good progress on many fronts.

At the start of the session, there was a lengthy disclaimer, it’s clear Storj is fully staffed complete with serious legal counsel. They also hired on a full fledged managment team. Rare to see in the ICO space, it seems Storj is being run like an actual series B or C Venture Capital funded startup. Notable mentions on the call were Ben Golub, previous executive in numerous enterprise software, including Docker Inc. Philip Hutchins, former Director at Bitpay. Jt Olio, Director of Engineering and experienced AWS cloud storage engineer.

They made sure that farmer payments were all caught up this round, and reiterated their commitment to the community. The process has been streamlined so there will be no further delays going forward. Many community members were unsure if there would be continued support now that the focus has moved to V3. It was good to see that they are supporting the continued miner operations. Numerous bugs were also resolved in the latest updates.

Specifics

With a surplus of storage providers, the most pressing issue for Storj was to solve the lacking demand side of the equation. Storj has worked with FileZilla in the past to enable traditional FTP compatibility. Storj has made another great stride to increase utilization of the network through the Open Source Partner Program (OSPP). With the program, their aim is to make sure both the supply(farmers) and demand(users) sides are balanced. 10 members are included in the OSPP. A current problem that Storj aims to solve is the lack of compensation offered to open source software providers and projects. Since the software is free under public license, funding is often a problem despite having so many users. The members of the OSPP account for “tens of petabytes petabytes per week” which Storj is seeking to capture. Golub described these partnerships as creating a “Virtuous Cycle” of innovation, network utilization and monetization.

On the marketing side of things, Jon Sanderson went on to talk about the strategy planned to help expand the network by an order of magnitude. Minimizing on-boarding friction, word of mouth marketing, and increased SEO were the main tactics they focused on. They decided to separate each side of their business into separate entities. The Storj brand will continue on representing the “supply” side of the business in compensating miners, while the new Tardigrade brand will come to represent the consumer facing “demand” side. The common Tardigrade was chosen as a mascot because of it’s pervasive and resilient characteristics in nature. It will include the open source partners, dAPP developers, and customers buying space. As part of the rebrand, there will be a number of naming convention changes which sound more enterprise friendly.

Further accomplishments with the network are increased number of commits and devs working to ramp up the project. To that end, dev updates will now be provided every 2 weeks. The storj network now has support of AWS S3 objects having the required characteristics:

• Key – The name that you assign to an object. You use the object key to retrieve the object. For more information, see Object Key and Metadata
• Version ID – Within a bucket, a key and version ID uniquely identify an object. The version ID is a string that Amazon S3 generates when you add an object to a bucket. For more information, see Object Versioning.
• Value – The content that you are storing. An object value can be any sequence of bytes. Objects can range in size from zero to 5 TB. For more information, see Uploading Objects.
• Metadata – A set of name-value pairs with which you can store information regarding the object. You can assign metadata, referred to as user-defined metadata, to your objects in Amazon S3. Amazon S3 also assigns system-metadata to these objects, which it uses for managing objects. For more information, see Object Key and Metadata.
• Subresources – Amazon S3 uses the subresource mechanism to store object-specific additional information. Because subresources are subordinates to objects, they are always associated with some other entity such as an object or a bucket. For more information, see Object Subresources.
• Access Control Information – You can control access to the objects you store in Amazon S3. Amazon S3 supports both the resource-based access control, such as an Access Control List (ACL) and bucket policies, and user-based access control. For more information, see Managing Access Permissions to Your Amazon S3 Resources.
  

A key takeaway from the update is the reiteration of the use of proof of work to prevent sybil attacks. Storj is borrowing the security strengths from its well tested decentralized peers. This will ensure the foundations of a truly censorship-proof future. Another interesting mention was that Storj plans to create a “mirroring service” which will automatically copy data from existing cloud storage providers so that users can easily migrate to the platform. Reducing customer friction is key to any enjoyable customer experience and spurring adoption.

Users can look forward to fully streamable video complete with ‘seek ahead” features coming directly from the network. Miners can expect to be brought on to the new version sometime in Q4.