Looking for some crowdsourced research, and I’m sure you knowledgeable lot are just the people to ask!
We are doing some market research, focus groups, and interviews via a 3rd party agency, to help with validating our launch strategy, amongst other things.
We are just rounding up some participants for this study, and want to make sure we have cast the net wide enough before we commence the next phase.
How you can help
What would be really helpful is listing out below organisations, businesses, projects and communities that are currently using alternative decentralised data storage in their operations, such as IPFS, Sia, Arweave, Storj.
Let’s look for those that fall into the following categories:
Web 3.0 Builders and Makers
Teams, projects, businesses or communities that are building for Web 3.0, and are utilising decentralised data at the moment in a variety of ways. Or perhaps they are more traditional businesses that aspire to use it, or are piloting it in some way
ChainSafe R&D and engineering firm (predominantly specialising in blockchain) that build decentralised storage integration product that interacts with Filecoin.
SenData S3 Compatible interface to Filecoin storage.
Gitopia GitHub-like software collaboration built on blockchain with Cosmos, but utilising Filecoin/IPFS/Arweave for file storage. Might Safe appeal as a less complex stack that would handle revisions by default?
HashAxis NFT marketplace built on Hedera. Uses IPFS for storage of minted NFTs.
Bacalhau “Bacalhau is a platform for fast, cost-efficient, and secure computation by running jobs where the data is generated and stored.”
efficiency, and to open up data processing to larger audiences.
Encloud Privacy first data storage application/front end for web3 (Filecoin/IPFS).
World Mobile A new mobile network / ISP built on blockchain aiming to
connect everyone, everywhere while advocating for economic freedom and dignity. Currently working with Cardano and Boson. Interesting see what their data storage needs/partners are, and also if they would benefit from things like DBCs. A very ambitious project.
Web3.Storage Frontend to IPFS that allows storage with simple price plans for developers
Resource Providers / Node Operators
These are enterprises or organisations that provide resources to the decentralised web, such are data centres committed to IPFS or ICP hosting. Or perhaps they are an organisation that provides services to data centres that provide decentralised hosting.
NBFS Pool Seems to be some sort of data centre management/service provider with a specialism in integration with Filecoin. Storage Sealing? Not sure what that means.
Equinix/Akash Equinix a huge player in data centers works with Akash to lease excess capacity in a decentralized manner.
Open Data Uploaders
These are projects or businesses that generate and store open Open public data, and are endeavouring to do so via decentralised services, or that could benefit from them.
NYC OpenData Public data published by NYC agencies
LabDAO Open life sciences research organisation. One petabyte of cloud storage open access data.
OpSci Autonomous Open Science Society. Scientific research that is built on open-source protocols, runs on a decentralized network (Filecoin). Interestingly website is currently disabled! “402: Payment Required”. Highlighting a Filecoin weakness?
Slingshot Filecoin’s community driven effort to get public datasets available on the network where individuals are rewarded forpreparing and uploading public data.
Moonlanding Campaign/community related to the above, funded by Protocol Labs
Important: Please do not reach out to any of these projects on behalf of our project in the course of doing this. We are conducting things via a 3rd party at the moment in order to do blind reseach and not bias our results. Thanks!
I’ll make this a wiki, so if you have any to contribute please drop them in!
Not sure if this is of interest but dropping for you to consider.
Equinix a huge player in data centers works with Akash to lease excess capacity in a decentralized manner.
OpenBazaar is a decentralized marketplace where goods and services are traded directly between parties without any middleman. They use IPFS for data storage. https://openbazaar.org
Brave Web Browser has built in IPFS support
Arbore is a free and open-source file-sharing application that enables you to send your pictures, documents, and files to your contacts privately and without limits.
FileNation is an open-source tool for sharing files using IPFS.
A dead drop is a drive or another storage device that is physically immobilized in a public location for people to pick up and deposit files. There is now an IPFS version, thanks to the IPFS Dead Drop project .
Snapshot is a voting platform for Web3 projects, DAOs, and communities that uses IPFS as its main storage layer. Snapshot uses IPFS to store proposals and user votes using a technique known as ‘off-chain’ voting, where the cryptographic signatures proving user votes are persisted to IPFS instead of being stored on the blockchain.
PeerPad.net is a service that allows you to write, collaborate, and export Markdown documents directly in your browser, similar to how Google Docs works.
The Inter-Planetary Version Control system (IPVC) is a distributed version control system similar to git but built on IPFS. It is suitable for any kind of data, not only human-readable content. It is also particularly suitable for versioning large files. The underlying concepts are heavily influenced by git and gitless .
Berty.tech will be an IPFS-based messaging app that will ensure connections are made directly between devices, without the need for servers, and will work on a local network if there is no internet connection. It will also work over Bluetooth or other proximity transport.
Decentraland is a virtual world you can explore with a VR set, your computer, or your smartphone. They store all the assets on IPFS, so these heavy files can be fetched from several other users at the same time for faster loading and synching.
DTube is hosting videos on IPFS to reduce stress on their infrastructure. The website itself is not decentralized, but it mainly manages coordination between users and the discoverability of content.
Killcord is an open project to automatically publicly publish data if the user doesn’t check in after some time. This can ensure the ongoing investigation of a journalist carries on if they are unable to do it themselves, as the information gathered will now be public.
There is an existing IPFS devgrant to host OpenStreetMaps assets on IPFS . In the long run, this could mean faster synchronization for apps using this scheme and lower bandwidth requirements for servers.
Blust.tv wants to use IPFS to distribute movies when requested by its users. By adding their proprietary secret-sauce, they will facilitate the legal streaming of videos over P2P networks.
The robotics company KODA is developing the world’s first decentralized robot dog called Koda-9 . It uses IPFS to store user data, such as security footage.
Netflix is trying to use IPFS to synchronize their Docker containers worldwide . Since each node fetches them from the fastest peers they know, synchronization is substantially faster than traditional synchronization methods.
Actyx is helping the manufacturers to upgrade their plants to the Industry 4.0era, meaning connecting the machines together for better performance, tolerance to failure, and flexibility. Actyx built a custom operating system on top of IPFS they deploy on all machines, so they emit metrics, receive orders, sync up information, and compute their next move locally.
OrbitDB is a serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database. OrbitDB uses IPFS as its data storage and IPFS Pubsub to automatically sync databases with peers. It’s an eventually consistent database that uses CRDTs for conflict-free database merges, making OrbitDB an excellent choice for decentralized apps (dApps), blockchain applications, and offline-first web applications. There are Go and Javascript implementations available.
For MongoDB, you can use ThreadDB or AvionDB , which are unstructured databases built on top of IPFS
JusticeNode has created an extension for the popular self-hosted cloud service NextCloud. This integration allows users to use IPFS as external storage.
Fleek.co allows you to effortlessly build sites & apps on IPFS. The workflow is similar to that of Netlify: developers can link their website or a web app hosted on GitHub to Fleek and have it automatically built and deployed on IPFS whenever a change is made to a specific branch. Fleek also comes with Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and domain name integration and plan to enable many more ways to deploy soon: more Git providers, deploy via command-line interface, drag & drop a folder, via API, etc.
Embark is an all-in-one developer platform for building and deploying decentralized applications. It currently integrates with Ethereum blockchains, decentralized storage like IPFS, and decentralized communication platforms like Whisper and Orbit.
Several plugins exist to decentralize your website built with popular static-site generators like VuePress or Gatsby .
The SecureMyState government-citizen communication app was built in two days during the ETHDenver 2020 hackathon. It lets Colorado citizens manage state-owned data about themselves, such as their driving license status or business registration. You can find out more about this project on Medium .
Origin is a blockchain-powered online commerce platform that stores data on IPFS. The Brave web browser has its own store on it to sell their swag.
GitHub Action lets you upload your GitHub Releases on IPFS automatically.
Aragon , a service for creating DAOs, uses IPFS to store its data.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most centralized pieces of the web. By having to ask a central place to know where to find google.com or facebook.com, it is a central point of failure. Backing up the DNS on IPFS could improve its availability. A prototype for Javascript has been published on NPM .
IOTA is a foundation maintaining the Tangle , a blockchain-like network with zero fees. Their vision is to automate the exchange of data between sensors, machines, and other devices, for free or sold by the provider. IOTA announced that data can now be hosted on IPFS, as shown in this demo .
MindSync wants to build a blockchain hosting AI competitions and let AI skills offer and demand meet.
RocketShoes is an education platform where students produce and tag learning materials, assignments, notes, and digital assets. These are stored on IPFS, and the blockchain ensures the timestamping, proof of ownership, and incentivization layer.
TheGraph wants to enable users to look for information on any blockchain or distributed service thanks to their query language GraphQL and the indexations of the chains thanks to IPFS.
Idena is a blockchain to prove that you are human (which is distinct from DID). It uses IPFS under the hood.
Robonomics is building a framework on top of Ethereum and IPFS for smart cities apps to easily exchange data (from sensors or computation, for example).
Augur is a blockchain and decentralized market where you can bet on anything or request predictions from the crowd’s wisdom. Like so many blockchain-based apps, the data is hosted on IPFS.
The weather risk marketplace Arbol relies on blockchain technology to track and validate weather data. Arbol uses IPFS to store multiple terabytes of verified weather data without fear of tampering.
Decentralized Identity is the concept of storing all your personal data on your devices rather than let every service you use store a partial copy of it. You having control of your data means that you decide which app has access to what, that you only fill in your information once, and that you can revoke access. Decentralized identity is a hot topic, and IPFS is one of the core technologies a lot of engineers build around. The identity wallet Nomios
Element is an open-source project that combines the content addressing and the interactiveness of Ethereum smart contracts to provide a tool for managing identity.
3ID Connect is developed by 3Box , a personal data manager for apps leveraging IPFS. 3Box wants to make using decentralized identity as simple as clicking on Connect with Google or Connect with Facebook. Their article explaining how to bring it to your app.
Microsoft started experimentation by pinning some decentralized identity information to IPFS and publishing the hash to the Bitcoin blockchain. Microsoft wrote a blog post about their findings .
The Ceramic Protocol is another proposition for decentralized identity on IPFS, along with a complete protocol for data and document exchanges.
Haven Protocol this is an open project to automatically publicly publish data if the user doesn’t check in after some time. It uses IPFS to ensure the ongoing investigation of a journalist carries on if they are unable to do it themselves, as the information gathered will now be public10.
White Rabbit : This project aims to use IPFS to distribute movies when requested by its users. By adding their proprietary secret-sauce, they will facilitate the legal streaming of videos over the P2P network
Content Delivery Networks
There are private and free companies doing this. Some open source attempts. Check out the CDNs at the bottom of the article. One of these surely would be open to SN.
As I understand it, the question is related to an earlier thread in which you asked what companies inspire forum users?
I really would like to help and I do not know if my vote will be helpful but I will try, because I believe that SafeNet is facing many threats.
I have been analyzing the genesis of SafeNet for a long time and I am considering how it should start in order to move and not make any major slip-ups at the beginning. And although I keep my fingers crossed for the start of the project, I have serious doubts whether the launch of the network, should include existing companies that store decentralized data.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that create network should be done with resources, the loss of which will have negligible effects, and problems with disruption in the operation of companies/projects that store more or less important data can be counterproductive.
Is this the stage, that (in assumption) allows for such bold talks/tests/analyses?
It’s only tangentially related. That was about communication style and brand sentiment resonnce with the existing community.
This is about alternative solution research.
Don’t worry! You may be over thinking this. And there is no vote… this is just a way getting you folks to help gather information about the current market and alternative solutions.
Apologies, but I don’t understand your question here, happy to try and answer it if you wanna re-state.
I am sorry because I was not specific enough. If I understand the research correctly are intended to explore the market in terms of acquiring companies/projects for the development of SafeNet that could contribute their resources to the network and test (because even when SafeNet starts working, it will still be testing such a new medium as an autonomous network) data storage in the SN
Did I understand correctly?
If so, I have concerns about this strategy of introducing the project to the market, and if I misunderstood and it is just a comparison to other companies as they entered the market, then everything is ok
Understanding the alternatives that consumers have for solving the problem that we feel Safe is the answer to.
Understanding how other projects are tackling the same
Identifying our unique attributes against these other solutions
Understanding who cares a lot about the problems we are solving, and how to communicate with them effectively
Finding a frame that puts our strengths at the centre
Also understanding our weaknesses
Identifying specific tactics that can be deployed in the midst of our launch strategy
Talking, learning, rinse and repeat. The better you know and empathise with your customer, and prospective users, the better you can serve their needs.
Additionally, uncovering partnerships and collaboration opportunities… afteral most of these projects aren’t “competitors” but peers and allies on the same mission.
Happy to see all the points, but especially this one first:
A while ago, I was trying to sell a software as a means to make some additional income. The guys, friends of mine, who made the software thought that their software is unique, and doesn’t really have much, or any competitors.
I believed them, and it sounded like a good job. What they didn’t realize, and what I found out soon after starting the job, was that while it was true that their software was unique, it wasn’t the only one aimed at solving the problems it was supposed to solve. Not even close, the space was actually quite heavily competed, and other companies were much better in getting their message across.
I quitted the job soon, as there was absolutely no chance to get the software anywhere. Not just because of others having better marketing, the software itself wasn’t just ready - and I wasn’t sure it would ever get there.
@JimCollinson I watched this video recently. You might consider reaching out to these cloud storage solutions. They might be able to make use of SN on their back end as a low cost solution to storage.
I think as we get closer reaching out to Naomi would be a great way to get some visibility. Also we should all pay for you to be at next years Swiss Could Native Day
Great job! Everyone else who contributed so far too of course.
anyway, feel free to have a browse, there’s tons of stuff I hadn’t seen before anyway