Filecoin, a startup that claims to be the world’s largest decentralized storage network, has revealed that its community has reached one Exabyte (or Exbibyte) of storage capacity as it tries to position itself as an alternative to centralized, established cloud storage giants such as AWS, Google Cloud, Dropbox or Microsoft Azure.
One EB is equivalent to 50,000 of the world’s largest hard disk drives, currently 20TB models from WD and Seagate, and this excess capacity comes from hundreds of individuals and organizations that have underutilized storage assets.
Filecoin is not unlike Bittorrent or rival Storj in that it is also a peer-to-peer network but its main incentive is to store files reliably over time and it provides an economic incentive for those who provide with the excess capacity. Filecoin’s FAQ explains “Users pay to store their files on storage miners which are computers responsible for storing files and proving they have stored the files correctly over time.”
The long term goal of Filecoin is to provide an alternative to what it calls costly cloud storage, removing the need for traditional data centres and colocation, pushing down prices and making geographically decentralized storage by default. As such it is more of a rival to traditional PAAS rather than the likes of IDrive or pCloud.