John Gleeson on Storj's decentralized cloud storage services

0:19of the recent news that storage has just come out with and i would love for you to kick it off for the viewers that aren't familiar with the details of storage with a high level overview of what is storage doing in the blockchain space and what are the solutions that your team is providing yeah absolutely so we are a cloud object storage service for developers

0:38and what we do is we make open source software that anybody can run data centers prosumers businesses and those businesses have many times extra hard drive capacity in their data centers they run our software they can share that extra capacity with us we aggregate it and then we make it available to developers as an s3 compatible storage service so it's it's sort of your alternative to

0:59amazon.com in the decentralized space and today our storage capacity is sourced from over 11 000 different independent people all around the world running our software so that it's a great sort of story for decentralization because we're able to provide a great competitive service on a huge number of different nodes in i think 96 different countries now

1:18wow very cool john and when i when you when i first looked at storage platform i saw decentralized cloud storage and as a consumer my mind goes to you know consumer storage but that's not the route that storage has chosen you're choosing more cloud storage for developers which obviously in the blockchain space is highly needed right now but can you talk about why is that

1:39that you're not focused on consumer data storage and developers is what's needed yeah absolutely so in sort of the world today we're if we're competing against you know the drop boxes and the boxes and that sort of thing and trying to reach consumers it's it's a lot larger number of people that we have to hit and market to and a lot of different

1:59sort of things that we have to build to be competitive that maybe aren't core to what we're offering but by targeting developers we're getting to that same customer base just indirectly right so by providing a great service that's 80 cheaper and allows developers to build more private and more secure applications we can target those developers we can get into those

2:18applications and we can reach all of those end users ultimately without having to really do do that part of the work which is trying to break through in the consumer space and also really deal with the support issues that you get with the commuters consumers you know passwords and all this stuff so developers are really a great target for us

2:36and so far so good it's working out great that's great to hear and yeah that does sound like the right route now that you have explained it and i know storage in the last week or so has had some huge announcement huge announcements big changes can you give us some insight into the announcements that your team has just made yeah absolutely so we've gotten some really great

2:58traction over the last year with the service and we've got a ton of feedback from developers basically that they love the idea right they love the distributed storage the security and the privacy but what they wanted was they wanted to interact with us the way they do with every other cloud storage provider what that means is introducing an s3 compatible gateway and it's a

3:15really big challenge to do when your storage is spread over 11 000 different storage notes but we spent the last eight months or so working on that and at the same time we got some feedback that some of the brand decisions that we had made were confusing to the developers as well and so what we did was we launched a new brand so we're launching under storage dcs

3:36decentralized cloud storage we're offering that gateway service along with the gateway service we've introduced multi-region high availability for every single component of the network we've launched new pricing so now we are the lowest cost provider for any storage provider on the market today at four dollars a terabyte for storage and seven dollars a terabyte from egress bandwidth

3:57and we've introduced a free tier 150 gigs of storage and bandwidth for developers so that they can try it get started with passion projects or whatever and then grow into that with larger projects as they move forward and so it's just sort of that total package of new brand new product new pricing and free tier so it's it's a lot and the reception has

4:16been excellent that's great to hear and yeah i was curious about the pricing and when i think of decentralized storage and i think you know at the ethereum blockchain just storage and transaction costs it seems like it's not cheap compared to potentially a centralized solution at least that's what i'm thinking in my head but i'm guessing that your team's

4:35found a way to make it cheaper than these high transaction fees on ethereum how is there a trade-off between the costs in the decentralized ecosystem versus the amazon way yeah so interestingly enough the traditional way to go about delivering cloud storage is you build a building right your data center you fill it full of racks and people and you park

4:56a bunch of internet pipes into it and you sell your cloud storage and you rinse leather repeat and a number of people that can actually do something like that is terribly fluid for you right i mean you have to be at absolutely hyperscale to be able to even enter that market and so decentralized cloud storage lets you enter that fray but in a completely

5:12different way instead of a ton of capex up front you can do it with opex and so what we've done is essentially crowdsource that same storage so instead of building data centers we've tapped into the latent storage all around the world and so that's our advantage so we don't have that upfront cost and we don't have that ongoing maintenance cost of those

5:28things we're able to pass that 80 savings on to our customers and at the same time we're also able to make it really economically rewarding and viable for the people who bring storage nodes so about 60 cents of every dollar that we take in goes back out to the network so it is really an interesting way to approach it we think of like the airbnb for hard drives

5:47and it's just it's subverting that model the way it's always been done but yet delivering that same service with an enterprise sla high availability at a cost point that can't be touched definitely and yeah when you remove that overhead and decentralize it there's obviously a lot less cost there and you mentioned one of the advantages in the beginning

6:07of for the developers is more privacy more security can you talk about what's the difference in using storage and why it's more secure yeah so decentralization has a lot of sort of advantages from an architectural perspective when it comes to cloud storage and some of those are actually the byproduct of just what you have to build to have a decentralized

6:27platform at all so when you're running a bunch of your architecture on the hardware that belongs to people you don't know you have to have things in place like strong encryption and you have to have redundancy built in for erasure coding and these sort of things that are foundational to being able to encrypt data client side and then encrypt it and the metadata

6:44break it up into tiny pieces store it across a bunch of storage nodes and be impervious to the fact that you could lose a bunch of storage nodes and still maintain the high availability of the data that's fundamental to our network but then we can turn that around and expose that as features to developers and a couple of those things are really great the end encryption where we never

7:01have the encryption keys we don't want the encryption keys we don't want to know what's stored on our platform that end-to-end encryption gives developers one key to making more secure and private applications the second one is we delegate authorization out to the edge and what that means is developers can create applications for file sharing where

7:21no storage component knows any usernames or users of the application at all all we know is that a request has come in and it's either valid or invalid we don't know what the data is we don't know who the person is and all of that granular level of access can be done through the application through the client application by developers and the tools to do it are

7:42super easy and so that's that's kind of the key there is being able to handle all of that access management without any any risk of creating leaky buckets or thinking that there is a creepy storage company that is out there mining any of that data right it is because of the fundamental architecture the decentralized applications it's impossible for us to

8:00get at that data and then we turn that around and expose it as feature set to developers very cool and yeah there's been you know controversy about storing you know cloud storage in a centralized way is really just storing your files on somebody else's computer yeah and if they have access to it then you're really giving them your files so yeah that's been a major topic of

8:21discussion so it's really interesting to hear about the security functions and the privacy and i'm sure the developers are much more aware of that than consumers and they probably like that function over over the traditional services so that's great to hear yeah absolutely yeah and go ahead yeah it was just a lot of that feedback has been you know it just like you were

8:41saying it goes back from the consumers those applications to the developers and then back to us and not only have we had to build those features up but we've also taken more of a privacy oriented posture and so we've ripped all the third-party trackers out of our system and all that good stuff and really tried to take this privacy first approach you know from from

8:56company culture to marketing initiatives all the way through to the products and features that we expose to developers that's great and are the developers that are using the service all all running their own validator nodes and because you mentioned there was like 11 000 plus nodes is there other people that are just running nodes but not using the

9:14service and is it really easy for anybody to just start running a validator so it's interesting so what we did was we made a design decision early on that was really driven by the audience and the people that are using the platform and with most decentralized projects you have a single node that's handling all the functions and you run a node if you

9:31want to participate in the network and what we found was that most users fell into one of two categories they either had hard drive spaces they wanted to share with us or they needed to store data for an application but the overwhelming majority of people did not have both needs and so we actually split out the peer classes into three different groups one that handles

9:50sort of the metadata and intermediation and figuring out what storage nodes data goes on and storing the metadata for the different objects that are stored in the platform then you have just a thing called a storage node and if you have hard drive space and extra bandwidth you can run a storage node that's all you do you set it you forget it and it stores and lets people

10:07retrieve data and then we have a developer client that takes the form of a s3 compatible gateway developer library and a command line interface and also a bunch of tools that have kind of plugged into like filezilla and rclone that lets you upload and download data and so if all you need to do is store data it acts like any other developer tool right if you've got a tool that's

10:25compatible with amazon's s3 it'll work with storage generate credentials and away you go and so by breaking the network up like this it really makes it easier for developers to just get started because they don't need to run anything they don't need to do anything they just need to treat it just like every other thing out there and that's part of the

10:41the sort of the combination of the architecture decisions we've made and understanding of the audience that we've got and so the feedback has consistently been just just look like those other surfaces out there but be better and that's the approach we've taken yeah and i think that's a great approach john and i could totally understand how developers they have a mission

11:01With their data and it's almost like if you wanted to force everybody who wanted to use ether to run a full node when they just wanted to make a transaction right you don't and but there are people that want to run nodes and have incentives to do that and they might make a few transactions but the majority of the people that are using the service aren't necessarily

11:19going to be running those validators validator nodes so there are obviously a lot of people that are already running a validator nodes for storage which is great and i'm guessing that ties in with the storage token can you talk a little bit about the storage token how it's used within the ecosystem yeah absolutely so the storchoke is a utility token

11:40and it's really there to facilitate transfers of value related to storing and retrieving of data and so again to make this as easy as possible developers developers can make a choice to choose either in to pay with a credit card or to pay with storage token there's an incentive for them to choose storage token to pay with and then at the same time what we do is we

12:00actually pay the storage nodes with storage token and storage is available on a couple dozen different exchanges so it's really easy to convert storage token into something else if you don't want to store data or just use it to store it on the platform and we've really seen a lot of advantages in terms of using the storage token because we have you know these 12 000 these things in 96

12:22different countries someone they're making you know just a couple dollars a month when they first join the network others are making a thousand dollars a month and the key thing here is that we can do all of that payment through the storage token we're doing that with a standard payment processor would almost eliminate a lot of the value now we've seen you know the impact of

12:39the increase in each bees lately and that's that in some cases that's been a little painful i will fully admit that but some of the things that we are doing are working with companies like matter labs zk sync to do an l2 payout solution and that is turning out to be a really excellent alternative and it helps you know put the power of you know the transaction

13:00processing in the hands of the storage nodes it allows us to do more efficient payment terms but yeah it's it's a fantastic way to sort of bootstrap the network and handle all of that payment processing and it's great to see the ethereum network sort of moving along and to take a leadership position with some of those l2 solutions to really streamline

13:17the cost that's associated with those payments yeah it's definitely great to hear that you're taking advantage of that as well and it seems so many different platforms are needing to use l2 on ethereum and we'll see how ethereum grows over this year hopefully some of these improvements will help with that but at least there's a lot of adoption it sounds like

13:37you guys have a lot of people in your network that are utilizing it and that's great success towards widespread adoption and with all of these updates that you've your team has just put out recently in the rebranding and listening to your developers i'm guessing you're just going to continue on with listening to your community that's obviously important but

13:55what would you say is going to be one of the key factors to the widespread success of storage for years to come yeah i'll tell you there are a few things that are going to really drive the needle for us probably the biggest thing is going to be channel partners right so finding ways to help you know find applications that have end users and

14:16and scale very broadly and really establishing traction within the channel partners the free tier is another thing that's really critical to our growth because it gets people to sort of looking to go i don't know what decentralized cloud storage is it sounds intriguing but you know i just want to really try it before i get too far invested and so

14:34it's it's that gateway to let people try it and then of course you know driving forward with you know some of the incentives that we can use for using storage token to buy storage and really make it even more economical for end users but yeah we're so far so good knock on wood we're seeing a lot of great traction and a huge burst already

14:55with the new features in the new branding and pricing model that's great john and for people that are interested in learning about the validator system or trying out the free tier and just other developers that want to learn more information what's the best way for them to get involved in the storage community and to get started yeah so they can check us

15:14out at storage.io at our website they can join our community at forum.storage.io and our documentation docs.storage.io is also a great place to start and of course you can just go to the website sign up for a query account and get immediate access and we've got really great docs in terms of getting started and using the platform and a lot of good case studies coming

15:34out right now in terms of companies like class filezilla and fire file base that are doing you know really good work integrated with the platform and taking advantage of centralized storage already great well i will leave those links in the description box below as well for the viewers thank you so much for taking the time john today to speak about storage

15:52all the best with the platform moving forward and let's follow up in the near future awesome thank you very much appreciate the time and have a great afternoon you