The initial Storj crowdsale has finally come to a close, and the Storj team is pleased with the results, having raised at least 910 BTC. Although they are still hard at work on furthering development, the funding raised for their decentralized cloud storage platform exceeded their expectations.

Storj, for the uninformed, is designed to allow users to store files over their peer-to-peer network. Using Metadisk, one can upload content to the network for distributed storage across its participating nodes; users either pay for this service in Storjcoin X--known as SJCX, the network’s native currency--or allow the network to store an equivalent amount of data on their own computer. This undercuts traditional corporate cloud storage services by an order of magnitude.

The Storj team promises to put the money from their crowdsale to good use. Some of it will be used to reimburse people for prior expenses paid out of pocket, and pay for salaries for full-time contributors as well as freelance work. The rest will go to further cloud storage development, research into decentralized technology, marketing and PR, community initiatives and projects, and legal counsel.

In addition to helping promote a decentralized Internet and earning Storjcoin X, crowdsale participants will receive early access to DriveShare.

DriveShare is another cloud storage application, but its purpose is slightly different from Metadisk: primarily for those who just want to make SJCX and have plenty of hard drive space to spare, it allows users to rent it out to the network. As soon as the beta is live, contributors will be given access in the order in which they contributed, until it’s ready for full public release.

Transparency is very important to Storj, and they have released a full list of their team members upon request. They want to make sure all funding is properly allocated, so you can track all of the bitcoins they raised from the crowdsale at address 132aBrspLgL54cm9eQfGNFLGqXwBRQrugc, as well as the leftover Storjcoin X at19KvumZgcs2owq9tF2obyg1SBmXDVdzNnW. Most of those funds will be used to reward users who contribute resources to the network.

Most SJCX has not yet been generated, but the developers plan to use a timelock transaction to ensure they cannot be arbitrarily spent. 75 million of those will be spent on community organization, such as elections. Another 75 million is reserved for platform developers working full-time or those seeking to earn development bounties. The rest will go to bounties encouraging the development of new apps on the Storj platform, and future crowdsales if necessary.

Going forward, the Storj team hopes to make centralized services like DropBox a thing of the past and is excited for the future.

To get more news and updates as they come, you can subscribe to the Storj newsletter via their website, or register on their forums where there’s an active community to help you. You can email questions or comments to [email protected]

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