Storj Labs has announced the general availability of Tardigrade, a decentralized cloud storage service designed for enterprise users.
According to the Tardigrade website, the network, which spans thousands of global nodes, is more affordable than Amazon and Google’s respective cloud services. The open-source service is compatible with Amazon S3.
Also, anyone can apply to host a node and earn money by sharing storage and bandwidth for distributed files. According to Storj Labs’ interim CEO and executive chairman Ben Golub, Tardigrade is an evolution of the company’s original network, which struggled with scalability.
Tardigrade is similar in approach to Filecoin, but with more of an enterprise-level focus. Filecoin raised $257 million in a 2017 initial coin offering (ICO), yet has delayed its mainnet launch—most recently due to the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) in China, where some 70% of its nodes are based.