From my perspective as an SNO, the only way to judge this acquisition is to stick to what we can actually verify:
(1) what Inveniam looks like as a business, and
(2) what Storj has disclosed in its own token reports and forum posts.
1. Inveniam’s scale – what we can reasonably say
Inveniam itself states that its new Diol marketplace connects “more than 26,000 market participants in over 100 countries, generating nearly $30M in annual recurring revenue” at launch:
- Inveniam’s own Diol launch article:
https://www.inveniam.io/resources/inveniam-unveils-diol-the-first-decentralized-marketplace-for-data-compute-and-storage - Same statement mirrored on Yahoo Finance:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/inveniam-unveils-diol-first-decentralized-110900711.html
That’s Inveniam’s number, not something Storj made up.
Independent SaaS/revenue trackers don’t show the exact same figure, but they’re directionally consistent in one important sense: they show Inveniam as a real, scaled, eight-figure-revenue company, not a small pre-revenue startup:
- GetLatka (self-reported/estimated SaaS metrics) lists $13.6M annual revenue and 66 employees:
https://getlatka.com/companies/inveniam.io - Growjo estimates $13.6M annual revenue and ~60 employees, plus ~$162M total funding:
https://growjo.com/company/Inveniam
So I don’t treat “nearly $30M ARR” as an independently audited fact, but it is Inveniam’s own stated figure for the broader Diol ecosystem, and the third-party data at least confirms we’re talking about a company with low-to-mid eight-figure revenue and dozens of staff, not vaporware.
On top of that there are institutional partners and investors that have done their own due diligence, e.g.:
- G42’s strategic investment in Inveniam:
https://www.g42.ai/resources/news/g42-announces-strategic-investment-inveniam-advance-ai-driven-transformation-private-markets
For me, that’s enough to say: Inveniam is a serious player with material recurring revenue and institutional backing. The exact ARR number can be debated, but the order of magnitude is not.
2.. What Storj actually told us in the last token report
The last detailed token report is “STORJ Token Balances and Flows Report: Q4 2024”:
https://www.storjtoken.com/blog/storj-token-balances-and-flows-report-q4-2024
A few data points from that report (all straight from Storj’s own table):
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At the end of September 2024, Storj held 34M STORJ in operational reserves.
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During Q4 2024, Storj used 7.7M STORJ, broken down roughly as:
- 0.5M STORJ – Storage Node Operators
- 0.6M STORJ – service providers
- 1.8M STORJ – bonuses + employees who elected partial pay in STORJ
- 4.8M STORJ – “general operations and liquidity purposes” (“Other”)
-
After these flows, 26.3M STORJ remained in operational reserves at year-end.
So in that quarter:
- SNO payouts accounted for only a small single-digit percentage of total token outflows,
- the largest line item by far was “Other” (4.8M), which the report explicitly describes as liquidity provisioning and general operations (including tokens liquidated on non-US exchanges to build cash reserves).
In other words: already by the end of 2024, the heavy token usage was not SNO-driven, but primarily liquidity and general operations. That’s Storj’s own wording and numbers.
The same Q4 report also clarifies that all long-term lockups have finished unlocking and that all remaining reserves (26.3M STORJ) are now in operational supply, held in a mix of cold/warm/hot wallets (see Table 1 + Table 2 in the report).
Since then, there have been no new token flow reports on storjtoken.com (you can see the list of updates here):
https://www.storjtoken.com/updates
3. Current token policy: 5% buyback, confirmed in multiple places
Storj announced its “Phase One” token-management plan (buybacks + staking) in July 2025:
- Blog post: https://www.storj.io/blog/storj-initiates-phase-one-of-token-management-plan
- Overview/links: https://www.storjtoken.com/updates
They later confirmed in several public places that they are buying back 5% of SNO payouts from the market:
- July 2025 Town Hall → referenced in the tokenomics discussion thread:
https://forum.storj.io/t/open-discussion-ideas-for-updated-tokenomics/30255/108 - Follow-up in “Storj Token Questions”, where jtolio quotes the same statement and gives the on-chain staking wallet address used for these buybacks:
https://forum.storj.io/t/storj-token-questions/30836/7 - Storj Town Hall October 30, 2025 recap, which again states that Storj is still buying back 5% of SNO payouts since June 2025:
https://forum.storj.io/t/storj-town-hall-october-30-2025/31039
So from mid-2025 onward, we are no longer in a “only spend from reserves” world. Storj is already partially recycling tokens via market buybacks, even if only at a cautious 5% rate.
4. How I connect these two sides (Inveniam + Storj)
Putting this together:
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Storj’s own Q4 2024 report shows that:
- SNO payouts were a relatively small part of token outflows,
- the biggest factor was “Other” = liquidity + general operations,
- and that operational reserves dropped from 34M → 26.3M STORJ in just one quarter.
-
There have been no new token-flow reports since Q4 2024, which means:
- we know reserves were finite, and
- we know they were being actively used.
-
Since mid-2025, Storj is explicitly buying back 5% of SNO payouts on the open market and parking them in a visible staking wallet (links above).
-
In parallel, Inveniam:
- publicly states that its Diol ecosystem is at “nearly $30M in annual recurring revenue”,
https://www.inveniam.io/resources/inveniam-unveils-diol-the-first-decentralized-marketplace-for-data-compute-and-storage - and multiple independent business-intelligence sites estimate Inveniam’s own revenue in the low-to-mid eight-figure range, e.g.:
https://getlatka.com/companies/inveniam.io
https://growjo.com/company/Inveniam
- publicly states that its Diol ecosystem is at “nearly $30M in annual recurring revenue”,
For me, the implication is straightforward and doesn’t require any drama:
- Storj’s legacy reserves were always intended to be used, and they have been – heavily for liquidity and operations, not primarily for SNO payouts.
- As those reserves decline, market purchases are the natural mechanism to fund any future token-denominated obligations (SNO payouts, optional employee token compensation, etc.).
- In that context, being acquired by a company with real eight-figure recurring revenue and institutional backing is **not a “we bought a bankrupt company” story; it’s a logical next step if the goal is to move from reserve-driven token flows to utilisation- and revenue-driven token recycling.
Yes, STORJ is officially a utility token and not positioned as an investment. But we are still in the crypto space, and in practice everyone receiving STORJ experiences it as an economic asset. In that world, actual utilisation (paid data, real customers, enterprise integrations) and the ability to fund buybacks from real revenue matter far more than how promotional the acquisition press release sounded.
That’s why I personally see this acquisition as structurally stabilising:
not because it removes all risk, but because it aligns Storj with a parent that has real revenue, external capital and a strong incentive to make utilisation – and thus sustainable token recycling – work.