Storj (SJCX)

What is Storj

Decentralized cloud storage represents a fundamental shift in the eciency and economics of large-scale storage. Eliminating central control allows users to store and share data without reliance on a third-party storage provider. Decentralization mitigates the risk of data failures and outages while simultaneously increasing the security and privacy of object storage. It also allows market forces to optimize for less expensive storage at a greater rate than any single provider could aord. Although there are many ways to build such a system, there are some specific responsibilities any given implementation should address. Based on our experience with petabyte-scale storage systems, we introduce a modular framework for considering these responsibilities and for building our distributed storage network. Additionally, we describe an initial concrete implementation for the entire framework.

Our system, the Storj Network, is a robust object store that encrypts, shards, and distributes data to nodes around the world for storage. Data is stored and served in a manner purposefully designed to prevent breaches. In order to accomplish this task, we’ve designed our system to be modular, consisting of independent components with taskspecific jobs. We’ve integrated these components to implement a decentralized object storage system that is not only secure, performant, and reliable but also significantly more economical than either on-premise or traditional, centralized cloud storage.

Before designing a system, it’s important to first define its requirements. There are many dierent ways to design a decentralized storage system. However, with the addition of a few requirements, the potential design space shrinks significantly. Our design constraints are heavily influenced by our product and market fit goals. By carefully considering each requirement, we ensure the framework we choose is as universal as possible, given the constraints.