@jammerdan I think we actually agree on more than it looks at first glance – especially on two points:
- Yes, the legacy STORJ reserves are very likely effectively gone by now.
- Yes, the Diol “26,000 participants / nearly $30M ARR” line is classic marketing spin.
Where I draw a different conclusion is what that implies about the acquisition and Inveniam as a business.
1. On reserves: yes, we should assume they’re used up
The Q4 2024 token report shows:
- 34M STORJ operational reserves at the start of Q4 2024
- 7.7M spent in that single quarter
- 26.3M left at year-end
- with the biggest chunk going into “other = operations + liquidity”, not SNO payouts. (storjtoken.com)
Given that:
- this was already late 2024,
- the quarterly burn rate was high, and
- there have been no new token-flow reports since,
I do assume, like you, that by late 2025 the old reserves are basically consumed or at least no longer a meaningful long-term buffer. That’s also exactly why Storj moved to market buybacks (5% of SNO payouts) in mid‑2025: you don’t introduce buybacks if you plan to live off reserves forever. (storjtoken.com)
So on this point I’m with you: the reserve era is over. Future token flows have to come from real business (revenues, capital, partners), not from a stash.
2. On “26,000 participants / nearly $30M ARR” – yes, it’s marketing
On the Diol announcement, I share your discomfort.
The exact wording in the Diol launch PR is roughly:
- more than 26,000 “market participants” in 100+ countries
- “generating nearly $30M in annual recurring revenue”
- participants include data owners, compute providers and storage operators. (inveniam.io)
Read quickly, that sounds like: Diol launched with 26k enthusiastic customers and almost $30M ARR on day one.
In reality:
- The 26k “participants” are clearly an aggregate of existing ecosystems: data owners, GPU providers, and storage operators (i.e. us SNOs + test accounts, etc.), many of whom have never heard of “Diol” as a product.
- The “nearly $30M ARR” is not broken down. It’s almost certainly an “ecosystem ARR” number (Inveniam + partners + acquired business), not audited Diol‑only SaaS revenue.
So yes:
It’s classic “fast-and-loose” marketing. It blurs the line between:
- infrastructure participants (SNOs, trial accounts, compute nodes), and
- paying software customers.
I don’t like that either. It’s exactly the sort of wording that made Storj comms hard to trust at times in the past.
3. Why I still don’t treat Inveniam as vaporware
Where I push back is on the jump from “the Diol PR is cringe” → “this might all be smoke and mirrors”.
Even if I completely ignore the “nearly $30M ARR” line as a reliable metric, there’s still a lot of hard evidence that Inveniam is not some random no‑name shell:
-
Independent SaaS / BI trackers (which have no incentive to parrot Inveniam’s PR) estimate:
- about $13.6M annual revenue
- 60–66 employees
- and about $162M total funding. (Latka)
-
Funding and strategic investors:
- $25M Series A led by Apex Group (global fund administrator). (Apex Group)
- Later round and pre‑Series B financing led by Cushman & Wakefield (NYSE: CWK). (Cushman & Wakefield)
- Strategic investment from G42, the Abu Dhabi AI group that itself has Microsoft and Mubadala money behind it; several sources now quote around $120M raised in total for Inveniam. (Ledger Insights)
-
Real, name‑brand enterprise partners / customers (the sort you would brag about):
- Cushman & Wakefield using Inveniam’s data OS for real estate valuations and tokenization work. (Cushman & Wakefield)
- Apex Group integrating Inveniam’s platform into fund admin and private-asset valuation workflows. (inveniam.io)
- Tokeny partnership + co‑investment to build tokenization infrastructure. (tokeny.com)
-
“Global leader” claim vs reality:
Their own material lists offices in New York, London, Abu Dhabi and Michigan, and positions them as a data OS for private assets, not a retail brand. (inveniam.io)
For a niche B2B infra company in private markets, it’s normal that you don’t see them in mainstream press – you see them in trade press, PE/infra news and partner PRs.
Individually, each of these could be spun. But taken together, the picture is clear:
This is a medium‑sized, well‑funded B2B infra company with real institutional clients, not a shiny landing page plus hot air.
My whole argument does not depend on Diol truly being at $30M ARR.
Even if the real recurring revenue were “only” $13–15M today, the conclusion stays the same: Inveniam is large enough and capitalized enough to be a serious parent for Storj.
4. On “am I now a Diol market participant?”
Honestly? The way they framed it, yeah – that’s almost certainly what they’re doing:
- buy Storj,
- add Storj SNOs, test accounts, GPU partners etc. into the “participant” total,
- then proudly talk about “26,000+ market participants in 100+ countries”.
From a pure marketing perspective it’s easy to see how they got there.
From a transparency perspective, it sucks. I’d much rather see:
- “X paying institutional customers”
- “Y integrated data sources”
- “Z infra providers (including Storj SNOs)”
…instead of one big rolled‑up vanity number.
So on that criticism: I think you, @Roxor and @alpharabbit are right to call it out. The wording invites misinterpretation and undermines trust.
5. What all of this implies for us as SNOs
Putting everything together:
- Reserves – we agree: realistically spent. Future token obligations (SNO payouts, optional employee comp, liquidity) will need to be funded from business, not stash. (storjtoken.com)
Token volatility as payment – I see this differently
In general, yes — a volatile token is not the ideal long-term payment mechanism for a decentralized infrastructure service. Many SNOs would understandably prefer a stable or fiat-denominated payout structure.
But speaking strictly from my own perspective, it’s not as negative as it sounds.
I’m currently hodling my payouts, and in that situation:
-
volatility isn’t inherently a disadvantage,
-
recurring buybacks are directly beneficial,
-
and with the legacy reserves realistically gone, those buybacks are no longer optional — they’re structurally necessary for the token cycle to function at all.
So while I fully understand the general argument against volatile-token payouts, in my own case the current setup is perfectly acceptable. As long as Storj transitions toward utilisation-driven recycling backed by real revenue, holding STORJ and benefiting from consistent buybacks is economically rational for me.
- Inveniam marketing – yes, some of the Diol wording is dodgy and too close to how Storj used to massage numbers. That’s a red flag in communication style, not hard proof that the underlying business is fake.
- Inveniam’s substance – separate from the PR fluff, there is strong evidence of a real, revenue‑generating, institutionally backed company with long‑term contracts in exactly the sort of markets that can actually afford to pay for decentralized infra.
So my bottom line is:
I absolutely share your skepticism about the Diol PR and the way they play with numbers.
But I don’t see any data that supports “this is all just marketing and Storj was effectively bought by nothing”.
The much more boring – and for us, more relevant – story is:
- Storj ran down its legacy reserves,
- started buybacks as a bridge,
- and is now sitting under a parent that actually has revenue and capital to support a utilisation‑based token cycle.
We should keep calling out BS marketing where we see it.
But we should also separate cringe comms from the more important question:
“Does this increase the chance that SNO payouts can be funded from real revenue in a few years instead of whatever’s left in a wallet?”
From everything we can verify today, my answer to that is still yes – cautiously, especially given that the market segment involves multi-billion-dollar players with thousands of employees, such as Cushman & Wakefield and their strategic alliance with Inveniam.
What bothers me far more than any token or marketing issue is the complete radio silence. We’re in an extremely turbulent phase, and there hasn’t been a single update in three weeks. At this point I’d really appreciate at least weekly communication — even if it’s just “we’re still finalizing contracts”, and ideally with some early numbers, progress indicators, or a clear implementation status.
