UltronGlow, a storage protocol that offers inexpensive, user-priced decentralized storage options, has started its beta program, the company said Wednesday.
The protocol aims to offer more economical and secure storage services than cloud-based, centralized storage providers like Google and Apple, according to its press release. It also aims to facilitate and expand participation in decentralized storage protocols by allowing users to purchase, lease and rent services from almost any type of computer.
UltronGlow joins an increasingly crowded field of decentralized storage networks, such as Arweave, Filecoin and BNB Greenfield, that have grown in popularity as traditional cloud services face mounting cyber security threats. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS), powered by the Filecoin blockchain, for example, experienced a 15-fold increase in the data stored on its network last year, according to Messari.
UltronGlow has 2,500 storage nodes, offering roughly 183 petabytes of data storage.
The platform is well positioned to carve out a space for itself in the crowded decentralized storage market due to its storage capacity and accessibility, Jason Anderson, chief technology evangelist at Ada Byron Foundation told CoinDesk exclusively.
“If you look at the decentralized storage market and Filecoin, for example, there’s a barrier to becoming a storage provider because you have to be vetted by the filecoin team, have sufficient hardware, etc., to even open the gate,” said Anderson. “The goal is to promote citizen data, where anybody has the ability to rent out [their extra storage] and reap some reward for doing so.”
UltronGlow’s pricing is also more competitive – and flexible – compared to that of more well-known decentralized protocols, Anderson said.
Storage rental prices on UltronGlow are determined by the protocol’s storage owners. Costs usually hover at around 50 cents per terabyte of storage, but users with a high uplink bandwidth, which expedites the rate at which data is transmitted from one place to another, could charge more for their available storage.
The protocol includes a staking-based check on power that aims to keep pricing honest, disincentivize fraud and minimize abuse between storage owners and renters. It works by requiring storage owners to stake a “small amount” of ultron glow (UTG) that will be slashed by the protocol if owners don’t honor their contractual obligations to the renters.
UltronGlow’s setup also would discourage bad actors beyond the protocol, such as hackers who might want to steal users’ data, by allowing for data to be spread out among tens of thousands of nodes instead of keeping all the data in one place such as in centralized data storage providers.
