A New SJ Satellite Is Coming — Early Joiners Get More!

Node Operators
,
1

Greetings everyone,

After operating a tutorial satellite for some time, I’m confident enough to start a real satellite where money is involved - not immediately - I’m working toward it. :grinning_face:

A Little Thank You

First, I’d like to thank SNOs who joined and supported my tutorial satellite. So far, 402 nodes (40 email addresses) have joined.

These nodes (and the SNO behind - if you ever create new nodes) will gain an additional 1.5% in earning if decided to join this new satellite.

This is possible because I’ll use a different accounting system - and there will be a page for you to see how exactly the number is calculated.

Join before 2027 start

Nodes (not SNOs) joins before the end of 2026 (December 31st) will gain an addition 1.5% in earning.

(This is independent of the acknowledgement above - for nodes joined tutorial satellite, you will get both).

Supporting development

There will be an option to contribute percentage earning back to Storj, may set via tag-signer, and I’ll contribute matching your contribution number (percentage wise).

There will be a page to show all contributions for transparency (with option to remain anonymous) and a mechanism to remind/introduce new SNO to do that.

Payout rate of this satellite?

storage (TB/m): $2.025
egress/audit/repair (per TB): $1

Truth is: I don’t yet know the actual cost of operating a satellite, I’ll increase payout if operating costs turn out to be lower than expected.

How could I join?

Open your config.yaml file, uncomment storage2.trust.sources setting, and change it to the following: storage2.trust.sources: https://static.storj.io/dcs-satellites,https://static.storkspace.net/dcs-satellites. Then restart your node.

This new satellite is hosted at https://sj.storkspace.net/.

A note on transparency and expectations

There’s still a lot of work to do, and I’ll be working on several things in parallel:

  • Establishing marketing channels
  • Building the accounting system
  • Developing the payment and payout system

Please don’t expect too much to happen in 2026. I’ll share updates as things progress (especially where money involved).

Thanks for reading and for your support!

FAQ:

2

Sounds neat, is there a dashboard with network-wide stats like how much data is stored?

3

I saw this request a lot, let me prio that.

4

where you plan your most clients will be, EU, US?

5

South East Asia :smiley:, but probably it won’t limit to be just there.

6

Do you want me to remove the Test satellite from the Trust thingy or are you happy to keep that as is?

7

Payments USDT or STORJ?

8

Attracting customers to a new service is never easy: I wish you luck!

9

Im happy to add my 2 that are on the test satalite.

10

Probably keep that as is, I’ll test auto delete data/account and might need keep up with the tutorial.

I’m thinking of USDC (didn’t know about MiCA until recently), but ERC20 gas is crazy, I’m thinking of USDC on stellar chain.

11

I am not sending my email address at the moment for privacy reasons. I am going to fix that in the coming days. I would say you earned my trust.

I noticed there is a bug in the code. With these settings nodes can join but not submit any bandwidth records aka orders back to the satellite. Fix is here: storagenode: don't require peer CA whitelist for order settlement · storj/storj@e6a5857 · GitHub

Did I understand you correct no payment for the moment right? Just a call for early birds with a small premium payout rate later? If so I am going to ignore the error messages in my log and wait for the fix getting rolled out. Just to make sure there is nothing else hidden underneath.

For everyone that would like to get rid of these error messages disabling the CA whitelist is a good workaround.

12

Hi, I’m open to suggestion about email, I think someone else might still hesitate to share, so I can just take the payout address as ID instead :smiley:.

P/s: woops, that drop to 37 wallet ids.

13

Have we solved this:

14

Good one, I don’t think we have solved this, I remember reading somewhere, there even a plan for resource (storage) control per satellite.

15

What does this mean? Will this not be on the Ethereum chain? A quick search shows that Metamask does not support it out of the box.

Edit: And what is needed to move the coins off this chain? Do I need ETH on Stellar too?

Why not staying on the Ethereum chain? When I send USDC a few days ago I paid $0.01 after changing the settings to “low”.

16

I ask chatgpt estimate if send to 100k wallet, how much would it cost:

Estimated cost for 100,000 transfers

These estimates use the current standard Ethereum gas price and Stellar’s standard fee. Batch-contract costs are illustrative, not guaranteed quotes.

Transfer method Without batching With batching Approx. batch count
Ethereum — native ETH $250 ~$350–$470 Hundreds to thousands
Ethereum — ERC-20 token $760 ~$585–$820 Hundreds to thousands
Stellar — native XLM ~$0.18 ~$0.18 1,000 batches
Stellar — Stellar-based token ~$0.18* ~$0.18* 1,000 batches

It’s 3 order of magnitude lower than ERC-20…

But if push come to shove, I’ll maybe send on both chains (I can cover gas fee on stellar, on ERC-20, probably SNO will eat it).

17

I’m talking from vague memories: but at its peak wasn’t Storj sending to around 3500 wallets (for around 35k nodes)? You could also look at Base for USDC: it’s cheap and more popular.

The hard part is making the money in the first place: your choice of network to send it out almost doesn’t matter :money_mouth_face:

18

For the size your satellite would have with 100K nodes this would be an insignificant costs. $10 per wallet and you would be looking at $1M in payout. Compared to that $1K in payout is fine.

I have bad experience with Stellar. They did monthly airdrops for about a year. Just one year later when it was time for my tax report I was surprised to see that they don’t keep the same history we are all used to. Even their own blockexplorer didn’t show the correct balance. They might have fixed that in the meantime. As a storagenode with just 12 payments in a year it also doesn’t matter. But on your end it might get painful quickly.

19

It’s a nonissue. Email is not a secret. If someone does
Not want to show their email – they are free to create another one.

$0.014 is crazy? How?

20

As others already wrote, 100k Transfers would be a multiple of the current network. If you reach this size, $800 would be insignificant compared to your profit. It would be less than 1 cent per transfer.

You could also set a minimum amount per transfer like $5 or so.