Our team member @JimCollinson has responded this morning to some of the recent questions received as to how Autonomi is different from other technology. Check out the post on Twitter/X
Here’s a breakdown of the current alternatives:
IPFS: This is the bread and butter of data storage for Web3 at present. Again this is nifty tech. Content addressable data is needed. But it doesn’t store anything. It creates pointers to data. Data that is stored elsewhere (predominantly on traditional servers) So progress, but only part of the puzzle.
Filecoin (FIL): This is a decentralized marketplace for IPFS data storage. You buy coins in a decentralized way… and negotiate with a storage provider to store the data for you in a traditional way. And you have to figure out between you how to get the data to them. Plus, you’ll still have to renegotiate year-on-year, and pay the bills to keep that data alive. Useful marketplace, but not quite fitting our requirements in full yet.
Arweave (AR): Permanent storage of data. Great! But not private, nor encrypted. Boo! Maybe you can roll your own encryption? I don’t know. But why can’t we all just have end-to-end encryption all the time for all the things. Is that too much to ask?
Internet Computer Protocol (ICP): Once again, great tech, and pushing the boundaries. Like all these others, allies and friends. But. Not permanent data. And the barrier to entry is very very high. So high that some might say it has a natural tendency toward centralization. If you want to contribute your resources to the network and run a node, you’d better have a data center and a few $100k to back it up.
So, just imagine if we could combine:
Content-addressable data like IPFS
Decentralized marketplace of Filecoin
Permanent data of Arweave
Have everything encrypted all the time as standard
and have a massively distributed network of millions of everyday devices …
I can’t stress enough but Arweave won’t use encryption because it goes in contrary to their own terms.
They have at least three layers of censorship and a price of what I’ve seen being betweeen $15-25k per TB and I see it really jumped by 1000$ during just today which might be frustrating for users.
Autonomi price is normalised and doesn’t depend that much on token market price volatility rather focusing on storage available.
Looks like there’s a new kid in town, https://www.walrus.xyz/. It seems they have made some waves since their testnet release a few months ago already; plus there are similarities to Autonomi. Like file division in multiple chunks and replication x5.
Biggest difference is it’s blockchain based of course… But from their saying, they rely on the fastest existing blockchain (The token is called SUI, #14 on coinmarketcap), developped by the same team.
What caught my attention is that a dropbox like project relying on Arweave recently made the switch to this walrus tech. The guy posted the reason why here : x.com
They don’t have permanent storage built-in as far I know. But could be worth having a look. Some people even mentioned it in the altcoindaily x autonomi yt video comments.
Their branding is cool, so it seems like a serious contender with a big audience already. I didn’t take the time to test it yet though!
