How Did Decentralized Cloud Storage Emerge?

Decentralized cloud storage is the result of countless changes and updates made to the internet ecosystem at large. It is, therefore, necessary to look at how the internet transitioned from its various phases to the current phase to put things into perspective.

When the internet was in its nascent state (or during Web 1.0), the majority of the users were consumers. Most of the data that was hosted on the internet was through on-premise servers. In more simpler terms, the internet acted as a content directory network for most of Web 1.0. With the advent of social media and rise in content creation, we transitioned to the next phase of the internet– Web 2.0 (2000–2010s).

When Web 2.0 came into being, there was a sharp increase in the number of online applications and platforms that allowed users to share their content, views, perspectives, and whatnot. As a result, on-premise servers ended up becoming a thing of the past. What the world next needed was cloud computing. Surely enough, cloud infrastructure was massively built over the period and most enterprises started relying on the cloud to store and host their data. Around this time, the content creators and users slowly started to lose the control over their data, information, and content. Centralized cloud authorities such as AWS or GCP became monopolies. More on this later. While the Web 2.0 phase was mostly about user experience and the innovations happening in the front end of the web, the next phase, Web 3.0, became all about the back-end.

Although the era of Web 3.0 is already here, the transition to Web 3.0 products and services is underway. This puts us at a key juncture in the history of the internet where control of the information and data hosted online is now put in the control of the creators and users. Now, users are slowly realizing the perils of centralization, censorship, and privacy-invasive practices that have plagued Web 2.0. In our next section, we dive deeper into the failures of traditional cloud storage and how they acted as a leeway for the inception of decentralized cloud storage.

Like we explained above, when Web 2.0 started becoming all about social media and content creation, the need for cloud computing and storage became indispensable. Some major players in the internet ecosystem, such as the Big Tech companies, started to monopolize the entire market of cloud storage. While solutions such as AWS, GCP, or Azure have all helped the internet evolve by offering reliable services, their mistakes are hard to ignore. Here are some of the prominent issues with the traditional cloud storage ecosystem:

All through the evolution of Web 2.0, decentralized networks were in the silos, with the earliest examples including solutions such as Napster and BitTorrent. While Napster is long gone, BitTorrent is still a force to be reckoned with. Centralized storage networks that were a large part of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 facilitate the transfer of data through central servers. Decentralized networks, on the other hand, facilitate the data transfer through a number of peers distributed across a wide geographical area.

This model of data transfer changed a lot of things– users were in control of data, there was better transparency, and accessing as well as sharing one’s data did not have to be controlled by a central authority.

With solutions such as IPFS, transfer and storage of data was made decentralized. But that wasn’t enough. For a decentralized network to stay up and running, incentives were to be put in place. Running a storage service as an open-source project for a benevolent cause, while being commendable, does not address the market needs of data storage. The cloud storage market is currently growing at a CAGR of 22.3 percent and is all set to reach 137.3 billion USD by 2025. There are two perspectives to consider here. One, there will be a sustained growth in adoption of cloud computing. Two, novel solutions will have space to compete with the current big players in the market.

If one were to look for decentralized storage solutions in the market now, IPFS, Filecoin, Storj, Sia, and Arweave would be some of the popular options. Read on as we provide a quick summary of each of the popular decentralized solutions of today:

Arcana Network is a decentralized storage network that incentivizes users through the $XAR token, and is optimized for storage of DApps and private data. While services such as Filecoin, Arweave, and IPFS are not a practical solution and strong competition to the traditional cloud storage market, Aracana is.

Arcana Network is a decentralized storage layer for Ethereum, offering storage for DApps built on EVM compatible chains, such as Ethereum, Binance chain, and Polygon (Matic). But Arcana doesn’t stop at storage. To fully realise the privacy and data ownership benefits of decentralized storage, you need a suite of services, which are currently not decentralised. Arcana fixes this with its Privacy Stack. Arcana’s Privacy stack offers Decentralized Storage that is end-to-end encrypted, along with Non-custodial Key Management Services (KMS) and Decentralized Identity and Access Management.

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