September 7, 2021: Payouts for the month of August are complete

Hello! Payouts are now complete.

We paid 336 unique wallet addresses on layer 1. All of these wallet addresses earned enough that the payment fee was 1/4th of the payout amount or less. There is no specific minimum payout threshold dollar amount, but it was roughly around $51. This is significantly higher than last month’s $15, hence the lower amount of layer 1 payouts compared to last month. We hoped EIP-1559 would overall lower transaction fees, but we’re starting to think layer 2 scaling is indeed necessary to get the Ethereum ecosystem to the next level.

We paid 906 unique wallet addresses through zkSync. Once again, we did not enforce minimum payment fees here at all as an incentive. Thanks to everyone who opted in! zkSync is especially valuable to us as we can cover (smaller) transaction fees with STORJ instead of Eth. Across both layers, there were 1241 unique wallet addresses.

If you have a final balance less than ~$51 and have not opted into zkSync, we’ll hang on to your payment in case fees drop next month or you accrue more. Otherwise, you can opt in to zkSync and get paid sooner.

I keep hearing great stories of developments in layer 2 land. We remain hopeful that the layer 2 ecosystem will continue to develop and folks will soon be able to transact and exchange STORJ in zkSync without ever having to leave for layer 1.

We’re also evaluating other ways to operate with STORJ, such as wrapped STORJ on other platforms (https://app.tzwrap.com/, https://bridge.avax.network/, etc.). Overall here the ball is in these other platforms’ courts. If a wrapping platform adds support for transacting STORJ then we will certainly prioritize adding it as another payment option besides zkSync.

Thanks everyone!

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Interesting statement. Does this mean Storj will become much more of a crypto project than it has been to date? in other words everything will be based around tokens and just priced in USD?

By crypto I assume you mean cryptocurrency as opposed to cryptography :). Even so, I’m not sure what you mean. What do you envision happening?

What I meant by the sentence you quoted is that for Ethereum to scale, more transactions are going to have to move to layer 2 (zkSync) eventually. I foresee and hope for a future where we pay SNOs on layer 2, exchanges support layer 2, and a SNO could conceivably only do layer 2 transactions without ever touching layer 1 rollup checkpoint transactions. This is a general comment about the Ethereum ecosystem and relatively unrelated to Storj, other than that Storj uses Ethereum for SNO payments.

If you’re referencing Why are our earnings calcualted directly in $ and not in Storj?, we do intend to continue our bookkeeping in USD.

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Thanks for the more detailed explanation.

No, that is not what I was referencing. It was more that Storj is currently a project that uses a token for payment and nothing more than that. But to use storj as a medium of exchange/payment for goods and services other than storj a conversion needs to take place. From your more detailed explanation it looks like you envisage more and more SNO’s keeping their storj within the crypto currency ecosystem.

I love you for saying this! I never liked that shorthand. With cryptography underpinning pretty much anything we do digitally, it doesn’t seem fair to use crypto as a shorthand for just the currencies. I’d argue that Storj is probably more a cryptography project than a cryptocurrency project. :wink:

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I think there are certainly some good opportunities for us to include more cryptocurrency integration than we have so far (one I’m particularly interested in is having access control options gated by smart contracts). Overall though, we’re explicitly disinterested in having blockchains in our storage codepath. See section 2.10 in https://www.storj.io/storjv3.pdf. Or maybe I’m still misunderstanding you!

My apologies, it seems I again was not clear. I explicitly mean that you would see more and more SNO’s retaining their tokens on L2 without ever for example converting to USD or another fiat currency.

Ha, okay, I’m sorry, yep, I was still misunderstanding.

We are currently investigating better/more integrated systems for letting customers pay for storage using STORJ than the one we have (coinpayments.net), but otherwise I meant that I hoped people would be able to use exchanges on L2.

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