When Storj, the decentralized cloud object storage company, first appeared on the scene in 2019 calling itself an “AirBnB for disk drives,”

S3-Compatible API from Filebase Intended to Make Decentralized Storage Easier

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2021-05-19 03:49:40

When Storj, the decentralized cloud object storage company, first appeared on the scene in 2019 calling itself an “AirBnB for disk drives,” the decentralized storage space was still rather nascent. Today, there are a handful more companies that have entered the space, but mainstream adoption still lags.

According to Filebase co-founder and COO Zac Cohen, that adoption is not lagging for lack of technological benefit, but rather ease of use and onboarding, problems that Filebase looks to solve by providing an Amazon Web Services‘ S3-compatible API, which eases onboarding, and abstracts the interactions with the underlying networks by offering turnkey configurations in a SaaS model.

“We recognized pretty early on that an easy on-ramp, that’s the only way that this is going to work. Web3 is either going to be wildly successful, or it’s going to be cumbersome and difficult,” said Cohen. “We really think that now’s the time to leverage decentralized storage in an interesting way and apply it to the cloud, but we also recognize that the only way that this is going to scale is that there needs to be a translation layer between the web to past ecosystems and the future state, and that’s really what Firebase represents.”

The “Web3” concept Cohen refers to is central to Filebase and the storage companies it works with, which currently include Storj Networks and the Sia Network, and will soon include the Filecoin Network and the Arweave Network by the end of 2021. Cohen said they realized early on that Web3 would be the way forward.