Hello,
2 weeks ago CMC made a blog post about Decentralized Storage. I find it quite interesting but there are some parts that wonder me. I a section they talk about scalability issues of providers. But StorJ doesn’t have scalability issues or does it?
In the same section they mentioned the used space of others and storj, but I wonder where they got the numbers from? They say StorJ has 14 PiB storage and about 8 .6 PiB used storage. But stojstats shows entire other numbers? Do anyone know where those numbers are from?
All together i think they talk a bit negatively about Decentralized Storage. What are your thoughts?
Here is the blog post:
Ps: I don’t want to go into the trading aspect of the blog post, as this doesn’t relay interest me and it’s quite normal to have traders trade a huge portion of the coin
Since that blog post is on a crypto-coin-related site: it takes an understandable position: but not closely related to Storj. From the first paragraph:
“...When evaluating any crypto project, its token is the ultimate measure of its success. After all, a project’s value is tied directly to the demand and utility of its token. If the token fails, so does the project...”
Storj isn’t a crypto project. It’s a private Cloud Object Storage company: that positions itself as a value alternative to Amazon S3 (with several other competitors that do so as well). You don’t need to touch crypto at all to be a customer: send Storj some cash and use all the space you like. Storj does rely on 3rd parties to provide the actual space… and it doesn’t pay those providers in cash. Instead it uses a crypto token so global payouts are fast and cheap. But the value of Storj isn’t based on the price of its token.
So most of the blog about tokenomics and minting can be ignored. But there’s still the question about if the projects it mentions will survive. Filecoin and Arweave barely have a plan (or pricing) to be profitable. Storj has a profitable model: and paying customers: and competitive pricing: but not enough used-space yet to cover payroll. If we’re around 30PB-paid now… we probably have to be around 300PB-paid for a secure future.
People that come to Storj from the mindset of miners/crypto (coins/tokens)/investing/trading would talk more about the tokens than why tokens were used in the first place. @Roxor summarized it perfectly.
Tokenomics is still very much important for Storj. Unless the price of STORJ moves up massively, they will run out of STORJ tokens to pay SNOs prolly mid-late 2026 extrapolating from the Q4 2024 reports. Then either they switch to something else, perhaps sunsetting the token, or having to rebuy.
Speculators have effectively kept this project alive.
This highlights the drawbacks of relying on the STORJ token for payment, given that its value is volatile. A stablecoin would be far better and second best to completely drop the whole crypto currency approach. Company shall reestablish far distanced from cryptocurrencies and blockchains as these still have a bad name among traditional (large and established) companies. It might be beneficial to explore and execute more conventional payment methods.
That certainly is the way it should work… if they made enough each month to buy those tokens. But they’re still “working toward profitability”. Until they have more paid-used-space… they’re paying with tokens they can’t afford (???) to replace… so the token value does affect how fast their supply goes down.
Because it will mark the end of their free money printer. Of course they have already liquidated some STORJ in bullish periods, but they will soon need profitable cash flows to sustain the network. This is not terribly unrelated to the recent courting of investor money.
