It is a strategic management decision. But it is not like compliance certification requirements came suddenly out of nothing. It was clear from the beginning (and asked many times), that they are crucial to be a realistic option for governments, public offices and large enterprises, Storj was and still is interested in. There is a reason all other cloud providers have them.
So they would have had plenty of time to go that route. Of course they didn’t and at the end they chose the fast route.
The problem is, now we hear something like this:
So now the reasoning is: As we have Select, we don’t really need SOC2 for the public network. That’s where the original decision turns into negative effects for the public network. Imagine Vivint on the public network and maybe even Cloudwave