Hats off to Th3Van — and some numbers on what that offer is actually worth

Node Operators
1

Hats off to @Th3Van — and some numbers on what that offer is actually worth

Up front: I used an AI assistant to work through the numbers in this post. I could see that Th3Van’s offer was a big deal, but I couldn’t confidently interpret all the figures on his stats page myself, so I had help doing the arithmetic and the framing. The source data is all public and linked below, and I’ve sanity-checked what I could. Any errors are still mine — please correct me.

I saw this on th3van.dk on 1 August and I think it deserves more attention than a quiet line at the bottom of a stats page:

I have contacted Storj and offered to run all 264 nodes for free, allowing Storj to keep the full payments for the rest of the year to support the project. I am also considering running all my nodes behind a single IP address for the same period.

Th3Van has been running nodes since 2020, survived a RAID6 triple-disk failure that wiped 128 nodes, migrated 649 TB across 3.5 billion pieces to hashstore in 525 hours, and has been one of the most transparent operators in this community throughout. And now he’s offering to hand back everything he earns for the rest of the year.

I ran the numbers on his own published stats, because I think it’s worth being concrete about what’s being given away.

What this saves Storj

His last seven payouts (all figures from his public zkSync ERA wallet):

Month STORJ USD
Jan 2026 8,804.61 390.95
Feb 2026 11,232.20 498.74
Mar 2026 11,695.37 519.31
Apr 2026 12,424.45 551.69
May 2026 7,660.46 340.15
Jun 2026 12,205.67 541.97
Jul 2026 14,198.40 630.46
Average 11,174 496

“The rest of the year” means five more payout months (August through December).

  • At the seven-month average: ~55,900 STORJ / ~$2,480
  • At the most recent month’s run rate: ~71,000 STORJ / ~$3,150

So call it $2,500–3,200, or roughly 56,000–71,000 STORJ.

For scale: his all-time payout on that wallet is $8,043. He is offering to forgo somewhere between a third and two-fifths of everything he has ever earned from this network, in a single gesture.

And that’s only the revenue side. His rack draws a measured 2,130 W. Over 153 days that’s about 7,800 kWh of Danish electricity he pays for himself, now with zero income against it. Depending on where DK1 lands, that’s another €1,000–2,100 out of pocket. Total real cost of the offer is closer to $3,500–5,300 than to the payout figure alone.

Put differently: Storj currently pays him about $0.82 per TB per month across 604 TB of stored data. For five months, that line item goes to zero.

How much slack does one operator like this actually represent?

This is the part I find genuinely interesting, especially given the current uncertainty and the risk of larger operators winding down.

From his stats page:

  • Used: 604.44 TB
  • Free: 1,910.08 TB
  • Allocated: 2,533.35 TB — the array is only 23.9% full
  • Plus 1,074 backup nodes already online and parked

He could absorb 3.2× his current stored data without buying a single drive. If the average departing operator holds 10 TB, that headroom covers roughly 190 operators walking away. At 20 TB each, about 95. The hardware is already spinning, already paid for, already in a DC with 25 Gbit/s uplink.

That is a meaningful buffer for a network in a rough patch, and it exists because one person over-provisioned years ago and kept it maintained.

One honest caveat on the single-IP idea

I want to flag this respectfully, because I think it’s worth Storj and Th3Van thinking through together rather than something to argue about.

The two halves of the offer pull against each other. Node selection picks one node per /24 subnet per segment. Th3Van currently spreads his 264 nodes across roughly 30 subnets. Consolidate everything behind a single IP and the entire fleet is treated as one selection unit — ingress collapses to approximately what a single node would receive.

That is arguably more generous, not less: it deliberately hands upload share to smaller operators instead of to himself. But it also means the 1.9 PB of headroom above would fill at a trickle rather than serving as a real shock absorber if other large SNOs exit. You can have the fleet as spare capacity, or you can have it stand aside — not both at once.

If it were up to me: take the free-nodes half of the offer, and keep the subnets as they are. The network may want that headroom reachable.

Anyway

Th3Van, whatever Storj decides — thank you. Offering to work for nothing for five months while paying your own power bill, at a moment when plenty of people are heading for the exit, is a different order of thing from posting encouragement on a forum. It’s easy to be loyal to a project when it’s paying you.

Hope you get a good answer back.

All figures derived from the publicly published stats at th3van.dk as of 4 August 2026. Electricity estimate assumes DKK 1.00–2.00/kWh all-in; the actual figure is his to know. Corrections welcome.

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The offer to run for free is certainly generous - I’m sure Storj will take all the help it can get!

I know there are a few monster setups in Europe - maybe if any of those SNOs decide to leave… they can upload their nodes to him instead (since he has so much spare space and fast Internet)?

I guess just as importantly… it sounds like he plans to stick around this year. Maybe the thing Storj needs most is that network stability: don’t rock-the-boat while they’re reorganizing.

3

Power in Denmark is expensive. Like really, really expensive. We saw surge prices of over $1/KWh last year.

@StorJ - I’ve always been looking up the @Th3Van. I would like to extend his offer, to cover all of my nodes as well. Please contact in PM, if this is needed.

4

Lol.

As I had suggested twice already:

https://www.gofundme.com/c/start/business-fundraising

People are willing to donate.

How can SNOs indicate that? Maybe SNOs could add the Storj wallet address in their config instead of their own? So tokens get sent back to Storj or something like that?

5

Actually that’s a good idea. Many people point their payout address to the one they have with Storj (to pay for their own usage). There’s no reason Storj couldn’t give us an official “donation” address… so payouts effectively get sent back to them.

6

I can provide free egress bandwidth for all my 13 nodes (80TB currently occupied) for ever, in return i would like Storj to transform into Holacracy a like managed company, as stated in Frederic Laloux’s book “Reinventing Organizations”
https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

7

For now please don’t. Th3Van has contacted me in a private message today. I will have to ask Shuja how this works. The dangerours part is that time limited payout cut might look like a manipulation of our numbers. So we might not be able to take that offer. I will try to get an answer on that.

8

I don’t know if storj offers prepaid plans. But couldn’t be buying such a plan and not using it a way to make donations to the company? :thinking:

9

If anyone actually wants to work for free, you can simply send your tokens back to the Storj Labs wallet. No need to create extra hassle for the team by asking to be removed from the payout list.

10

Right now, Germany is almost solely to blame for these prices. During the day, the massive influx of unwanted solar power drives prices into negative territory across Europe, yet once the sun goes down, we have no reserves left. Everything is being imported from abroad. The energy transition has failed.

11

Solar itself is not bad thing, it is technology, just need to use it right.

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I completely agree, Vadim. The technology itself is fine, but Germany’s implementation is the problem. To ‘use it right’, solar needs massive storage, which Germany failed to build.

This creates a Duck Curve’ effect:

Daytime: Germany overproduces solar with no place to store it, flooding the EU grid and causing negative prices.
Evening: The sun sets exactly when demand peaks. Lacking storage and reliable baseload plants, Germany suddenly faces a massive supply gap.
The Result is: Germany is forced to urgently import power, driving electricity prices through the roof for all of Europe.

So, the technology didn’t fail – but expanding solar without building the necessary storage infrastructure did.

For me its between 0,10 - 3€

13

It is not only Germany problem, wind is totally same thing as solar. gladly i have fixed price around 0.19-0.2 eur I also have solar on balcony, it offsett my node consumption during day.
My nodes eat all that solar produce.

14

That is by design. Big companies want to keep making a lot of money. And they spread the narrative that it needs standby gas tourbines that will drive the electricity price up.

The good news is if you look at battery storage you see a different picture. They try hard to slow it down but the total capacity keeps rising and even more is in planning. An exponential growth.

I have looked into battery storage myself. Basically you can do arbitrage trading and charge them when energy price is low and consume it when the price is high. Right now the battery is a bit expensive for that but it will not take long until it gets profitable. Its comming. Its just not in the mainstream media because these big companies have an interested to spread false informations.

15

The shutdown of nuclear and coal power plants was a political decision. The companies cannot be blamed for that.

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companies make lobby to government to make more profit. That’s why today we have green brainwash. this green technologies are not actually green.

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This is simply not true and spreading misinformation. Germany is improving Clean energy and so on. But you are missing, that there are Price zones for each region (Germany as an entire land has one single price zone). The Price in one pricezone is dictated by the most expensive plant currently producing. Here you can see, that countrys with more clean energy has better pricing.

18

Germany closed Nuclear powerplants with out any normal backup plant, this is the result.

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Maybe we need to expand the SNOs into battery storage. Hopefully we don’t have to split the network into Select vs Global. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

P.S.
Re:gas turbines. It’s not a conspiracy to drive prices up. The turbine is already spinning. If you try to add a powered off turbine to an active grid, there will be a lot of smoke and a few million people with burnt out electrical devices. The gas turbines are needed to stabilize the frequency of the network.

Editor’s note: standby turbines need to first be spun up, synced to the grid, then added. It’s not an on-off state.

20

modern PV inverters can regulate voltage, supply reactive power, respond to frequency deviations within milliseconds and, with grid-forming controls, provide synthetic inertia. Unlike a gas turbine, they do not first need to accelerate a large mechanical rotor before reacting.

And gas absolutely can drive electricity prices upward. When a gas-fired plant is the last generator required to meet demand, its relatively high fuel and CO₂ costs often determine the market price for that hour. Italy is a particularly clear example: its strong dependence on gas-fired generation has repeatedly contributed to higher wholesale prices. Gas turbines may provide useful flexibility, but that does not make their effect on electricity prices disappear.