The Next Generation of Decentralised Cloud Storage

mrblueberry(41)

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End-to-end encrypted, where only you've access to your data on the blockchain.

Introduction

The cloud storage market is extensive and is expected to grow from $30.70 billion in 2017 to $88.91 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 23.7%. However, major players like Amazon and Google currently dominate the space. If decentralised storage can capture even a small percentage of that market, it'll be a large industry. That's why the race to be the top decentralised storage provider is so competitive, with Storj, Sia, Filecoin, and FortKnoxter all competing for market share. And recently, we have yet another contender - Memority.

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From the competitive analysis above, it's obvious that general advantages of the listed features belong to Memority. And we'll discuss in this article its potential to be faster, cheaper, better and more secure storage for mainstream adoption.

Memority

A typical decentralised storage system is a collection of independent repositories worldwide. This includes not only specialised hosting providers, but also computing devices of ordinary users like you and me.

Sooner than later, it'll be almost necessary as data is growing faster than ever before and is predicted to increase from 4.4 zettabytes today to around 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020. Having said that, a centralised data storage solution is not going to be future-proofed.

Memority promises a completely decentralised, ultra-secure storage of valuable data on the blockchain, which ensures the continued availability of several encrypted copies of data on unrelated storage locations around the world. Sounds ambitious? But it's really doable with today's technologies. Just not so available with the existing decentralised cloud solutions.

Why Memority?

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File Encryption

All cloud storage solutions must ensure that no one except the owner can physically view the contents of the files. This is an important feature regardless of the centralised or decentralised capability. Dropbox, Amazon S3 and Google Drive offer this feature with a traditional password protection and 2FA. Without encryption of files with a private key, which is stored only by the data owner, a technical opportunity to access the data exists for third parties.

On the Memority platform, when you're uploading files to the repository, they are encrypted with a private key, which is stored only by the user. This ensures data access is possible only with this private key, which is stored only by the data owner.

Decentralised Storage

Many decentralised storage solutions create several copies of data on unrelated storages for data redundancy and availability. That's nothing new. Memority stores 10 copies of data by default. What sets Memority apart from its competitors is - the decentralised checking and recovery of the required number of copies of the file.

The lack of recovery of stored copies of the file may result in data loss after the shutdown of computers that stored data. In other words, there'll be less and less copies until the file becomes unavailable. This is a significant drawback from Storj, Sia and Filecoin as they check and restore files only from the file owner's computer. Not really "decentralised", isn't it?

Protection from Data Forgery

Without storing hash codes or unique file identifiers in the blockchain database, the data has the possibility to be tampered with. Dropbox, Amazon S3 and Google Drive do not use blockchain as they are based on a centralised solution. On the other hand, FortKnoxter, Sia, Storj and Filecoin do not write original file hash codes into blockchain.

But Memority realised the importance. Unique data hash identifiers are stored in its blockchain database, and the system regularly looks for forgery and restores the desired number of copies of the original data if the files have been tampered with.

Motivation of All Participants

To have a self-sufficient ecosystem, it is very important to build a large developer community that can create many new applications to address the different needs of businesses, government organisations and individuals, which in turn attracts more users to participate on the platform.

To motivate and encourage more users, developers of all applications receive rewards for storing each byte of data uploaded through their application. Don't worry if you're not a developer. You still can get rewarded by being a hoster -someone who provide their disk space for platform users to store their data. That's not all. You can also be a miner if you hold 10,000 or more tokens.

Proof of Authority Mining

Memority runs on EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) using a new consensus algorithm called Proof of Authority. This approach enables Memority to multiply the network speed and reduce the computational cost of maintaining its performance because the computing power is irrelevant to the process of blocks creation and will not increase with time. This is replaced with miner's authority where they prove by having a large stake in the system. Therefore, a limited number of tokens is issued, and mining commissions will be charged when paying for file storage.

API for Application Development

At the moment, Dropbox, Google Drive, FortKnoxter, Sia, Storj and Filecoin don't provide third party developers interface to create applications out of the box. Without this ability, the product becomes yet another app for storing files and will gradually lose popularity with the emergence of similar offerings.

Memority, on the other hand, provide an API service that allows third party developers to create desktop and online applications for decentralised encrypted storage of various types of data even without blockchain expertise.

Team/Advisors

The project is developed by a team from Estonia, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates and consists of 15 people with high competency in a wide range of skills from programming, blockchain to legal and marketing. For more than half a year, the team has been working on the development of Memority platform to help people and companies around the world keep their data entirely safe.

They also have a solid team of advisors as well, all experts in their respected field. I don't feel it is the strongest support but they all have defined roles as advisors which I do like. I believe some of these advisors are seed investors so it's in the best interest they succeed.

Roadmap

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The project idea started back in 2016 and development begun since 2017. Recently, the team has opened the alpha release of their MVP in April. You can try it out here: https://memority.io/alpha

Beta release is scheduled in July, which is only few months away from the time of writing. Looking at the alpha release, I'm really excited to see what other features the team is going to packed into beta. The actual product development will start in August once the team gathered feedback from both the alpha and beta release.

If everything goes well, we should be welcoming the game-changer of decentralised cloud solution by March 2019.

Summary

Data is encrypted with your private key
Data is protected from accidental deletion
Data is protected from forgery
The system is completely self-contained and independent
Reward system for miner, developer, hoster

All in all, I believe Memority is bringing something necessary to the cloud storage space. As data continues to increase, centralised solutions will one day be obsolete. While there are many decentralised storage offerings, they're either not incentivised enough to get wide popularity or not self-sufficient as they lack self-cleaning mechanisms from unnecessary data, and they do not guarantee independence from the centralised system or the data owner.

Token Metrics

20% bonus Pre-ICO: May 16th - May 30th
15% bonus ICO: May 31th - June 30th
10% bonus ICO: July 1th - July 31th
5% bonus ICO: August 1th - October 31th

Token price: 0.1 USD

Soft cap: 5,000,000 USD
Hard cap: 85,500,000 USD

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