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Ok you invested in Storage crypto, maybe you didn't do well? This post was originally set to go out May 2021, then I held off as the market spiked, again, to see how the Storage Segment would settle and boy did it settle.
Imo there is still hope for storage , if these crypto storage offers eventually figure out how to monetize storage as a service... with Smart Contracts and level 2 sidechains using EVM or similar.
My investor advice? "Look under the hood" cuz not all storage teams measure up in the four key areas
Where 'Plan' really means Sales/Marketing/Monetization of differentiated value add, that people actually need/want.
Crypto Storage is more than just "more of the same" viewed through TKO's BullsEye Crypto Analysis Quadrant
This is a deep research post, so if you don't have the time right now, please bookmark and re-visit when you get the chance with enough undisturbed, quality time in hand. A deeper dive beyond the market's new storage pet, CHIA Network.
Honourable Mention? CHIA, #310 built by the inventor of Bittorrent now #59. CHIA is currently advertised as a Smart Contract Platform as CHIA didn't show up categorised as Storage in Coingecko... hmmm.
Reading the Rings: Visual Overview of Deep Comparative Analytical Data, TK Style.
The goal in creating this methodology for crypto investors was to at a glance, once the criteria for comparison is understood within the broad information quadrants, any investor could read the rings and know where the project and market is at, the SOTU of sorts, in just a glance. Sort of like looking a gauges on a sports car. (See the bottom of the post for how the TKO BullsEye works)
Value add differentiation in the crowded Crypto Distributed Storage as a Service "DSaaS" market segment takes many forms
In this issue we take a look at the top 8 storage plays in crypto through the lens of the crypto investor, plus one THETA Network, which leverages end user storage to rent upstream and downstream bandwidth and pay you crypto for doing so, so others may stream movies "BitTorrent Style" to another users browser based Movie player.
The search for value here is focused on meeting specific needs of the user 'renting' their storage to earn rewards and keep the cryptocurenty settlement networking running, earning rewards for that as well.
REAL VALUE ADD to me also adds in 'liquidity' that is the ability to convert to other cryptocurrencies and/or fiat either directly or indirectly in the latter case and, as an investor actually be able to use the crypto coin or token for something other than its utility purpose within the storage or hybrid storage/bandwidth renting market segment. Certainly the inflation model of the crypto currency offering distributed storage as a service is important. Finally we all like to think these storage solutions will be performant, that is offer the online CX we have learned to expect from the Internet.
Of, let's dig in and look under the hood of these Storage Crypto Offers to discover the real value of each and do a bit of comparison to help risk profile and prioritize your investments in the highly competitive crypto storage market segment:
#36 FileCoin, the Villianized, Returns... sort of
Store, Store anywhere a Store- Is it just IPFS under the hood? :
Ok, After Filecoin took in a record amount of cash during their ICO, what have they done since to show for it?
The recent Filecoin rise from the ashes of ridicule and scandal has been meteoric , followed by a collapse equally magnificent and, one must wonder why. Nothing under the hood really? One can not subsist on IPFS alone... as it is a commodity now on many platforms, #BAT included.
Seriously, as a firmware developer in the storage space once told me, its all about the IOPs InputOutput Per Second data read/writes to storage media (SSD or HDD), that is what real companies pay for in the storage space, 4K random Read/write speed using a file system with as little write amplification as possible, so very little de-duplication effort and cost is required. Will they get a BTC bounce after the latest sag? I am not so sure as the Filecoin Market Value recent collapse has investors thinking otherwise.
The Filecoin "buy" line below ? Sorry I'm not buyin' it.., They need to pivot hard, fast into a meaningful value add differentiated offer to have any hope of staying relevant after their historic less than investor friendly arrival on the crypto 'scene'.
#59 BitTorrent, son of TRON: What's really going on here...
Bit Torrent's entry into the crypto world has been less than spectacular, more a move for investors from , what the heck is this stuff and why does it matter to, ok I think I get it, then whoa isn't That doing a better job? Still compared to #Filecoin, #BTT is moving sideways nicely the past six months, as most investors recognize the name and general value to the IT market as a whole..
Talking about rolling your installed base is one thing, incentivising the installed base to do the same is an entirely different story
Does the team at Bittorrent have the vision, tech and BD chops to make it happen? hmm the verdict imo is still waiting for the investor jury to 'weigh in' on this one. Personally their website investor ' Buy' line does not cut it... , tres geeekeee, non?
#73 ARWEAVE: What's in a name? We are not sure, but we are willing to look...a few facts
Leader (new) See more below...
#88 HOLO The Storage Market YOYO: A Gambling Table for Speculators Playing each other or, is there really more under the hood?
Challenger
Full of techno swagger the Holo CEO is, now the Holo team must show us what they really have, sooner rather than later. Otherwise they get relegated to Whale gambling table status, imo. Chop, chop.
The Holo investor 'Buy' line? What does the below really mean? Can any crypto investor decipher this one for me?
A Distributed Cloud Hosting marketplace? Sounds like the Sales Prevention team, otherwise known as marketing is hard at work on this one. Sorry, I'll pass for now, especially when I can't even figure out what this is on the front page of their website.
#131 SIA: The Thinker? Maybe: Does any investor really get what they are up to? Let's look at the facts
Challenger
SIA like Storj, were the early 'darlings' on the (largely speculative) crypto storage scene, both have been on a roller coaster ride, spiking massively in late 2017 during those heady days of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), some investors thought , based on the last few years, these two were destined to be early shitcoins, essentially left by the roadside by speculative investors running to other glitzy crypto upstarts with better short term prospects. Well they are both still here and are both spiking hard in the last few weeks like good unicorns should?
SIA had just started to spike earlier this year versus the late 2017 spike they benefited from (building up the war chest beyond their early ICO take of XXXX) , versus the other early player Storj, was spiking "to the moon". Again, what is behind this most recent move of SIA? Real value delivery increasing retail buy the actual users of Storj, whale/hodler speculation or, a bit of both? Let's dig in and have a look TKO BullsEye style in a future post.
#73 ARWEAVE: What's in a name? We are not sure, but we are willing to look...a few facts
Leader(New)
Arweave is a relative newbie to the storage space, So I left them in the same spot of the original post which never got published, whose price had languished for a full year before it lit up in May, sagged and lit up again, and has been up ever since August this past year, albeit the full year is a bit of twin peak roller coaster over the entire year. So What's up with Arweave now firmly and impressively in the top 100 the past 6 months?
Really store stuff forever? What is this the CIA? ... hmm. I must admit the bold claim peaked my interest so I watched the video below the (very graphically ugly) website main page snapshot you see underneath this sentence.. really doesn't do the Arweave vision justice.
Ok PermaWeb, Blockweave linking of files between chains might work in the short and medum term, but who is paying for the infrastructure long term, and can Arweave survive the next EMP blast from the sun, its a fair question.., Arweave incentivizing miners to keep their storage up might be a stretch as miners are always looking to make a bigger buck in the long run. Plus being a power sucking alien is not so cool these days, if I understand how Arweave's mining works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2unaCBlN0us
#295 STORJ: Is their Story Enough? Let's find out, or should we even waste our time? Bullseye Potential? Maybe?
Hopeful (once a leader)
Tokens operating in the ERC20 called STORJ exist on the ETH 1.0 blockchain. Given ETH2.0 has been rescheduled for delivery as a PoS Market entrant for July of 2021, for the time being, the TPS settlement times for transactions using STORJ will be well what they are, 6-9 TPS per second. Back from the edge of the road, Storj was looking like roadkill and a shitcoin, they bounced back and are right back in that awful position of investor's thinking why should I even look at these guys, so what needs to change to recreate their initial incredible spike in Market Cap and make it permanent?
Look Storj should be on the right path of ERCxxxx Smart Contracts running on EVM equipped L2 side chains, PoS Staking etc... on ETH 2.0 so what gives?
One look at their website main page, and we likely have the story.., Seriously Object Storage?
If that's the case then Storj imo need to make CEPH fast, and since Storj aren't a low level storage hardware/firmware developer shop, that is not going to happen.. so they will need a partner, with deep tech staff. Not supporting Block Storage is a big miss on 50% of the addressable market...
#349 MAIDSafe: Boiling the Internet 2.0 Frog, Slowly but surely: Almost Ready to Go? Where? Bullseye for B2C?
Hopeful, Bright Ideas (Building B2C Internet 2.0)
One of the original crypto plays, I have a deep dive here , because really the SafeNetwork is a B2C play, that is business to consumer play, quite different from the others, positioned as Internet 2.0 in most respects. Hence the deep dive below. If you bought Maidsafe right at the beginning you are way up. My advice is hold on to it because this is a very special LONG term investment play.., another three years minimum.
Lightly traded OMNICoin based MAIDsafe Token, which converts to SAFECoin we are told, by the inventors, soon, happens when the team release the 'end game' SAFENetwork into the wild. OK, what exactly is SAFENetwork and why has it taken so long? Heck MAIDsafe is one of the early originals rising to media notice around the same time as Ethereum. Well having discovered MAIDSafe in 2015 (Max Keiser episode) , TK has since been tracking MAID closely since July of 2017. The reality is MAIDsafe, which is pre-Bitcoin, started off as an Internet 2.0 project, way back in 2004 in David Irvine's mind, a veteran Scottish Networking Engineer, with a long history of rolling up his sleeves to get it done in that IT space. (Heck even Vinton Cerf, so called inventor of the Internet and Marc Andreesen co-inventor of the first Browser Mosaic, thinks MAIDSafe was the way the Internet should have been built in the first place.)
A power to the people populist play, ok there is a place for this in the world for the consumer market types.., that place Maidsafe is creating is the SafeNetwork DAO Distributed Autonomous Organization centred around renting storage to and from other parties, complete with reputation scoring for good storage behaviour. Once its released, maybe later in 2022 the SafeNetwork DAO drives everything, possibly supporting a break-away world without the crony capitalists attached. Think Mennonites and you get the picture.
Personally I see an opportunity for MAIDSafe to be a leader in the Worldwide Consumer Internet 2.0, one which is truly distributed and under nobody's control (just us the people) operating as a self managing DAO "Distributed Autonomous System", which just does what the Internet should have done in the first place, serve mankind for free for most all basic functions and, not simply and largely serve the current Internet's vested interests, as is the case today. How Maidsafe commercialize the SafeNetwork is still a mystery.
The dogged determination of SAFENetwork (MAIDsafe Token's project name) visionary founder David Irvine is impressive, as the amount of work completed by a very small, largely Scottish team, more recently supplemented by remote helpers everywhere worldwide and a SAFENetwork project (A registered non for profit foundation in Scotland) funded team of developers located in India, now churning out LoCs (Lines of Code) largely in the concurrent (auto garbage collected, memory leak safe , scale out capable)RUST language which is the core technology used by the team to create their SAFENetwork vision of Internet 2.0.
The SAFENetwork is a much bigger project than "Just distributed storage", involving a secure CMS Content Management System capability , Browser and App Development Environment available to anyone in open source creating value for any user, which is a much bigger vision than just the Storage Market segment pursued by the aforementioned. The question remains though, did MAIDSafe bite off more than they can chew? Given the pace and the changes going on in the marketplace effort to create a new Internet 2.0, one could easily arrive at that conclusion.
There are also two facts, imo, that standout as big challenges to SAfenetwork and, that is 1.- How can SAFENetwork effectively create a self-sustaining ecosystem of developers and grow the user base beyond what has been completed today largely by the goodwill and energy of the developers and team, likely paid a modest amount to get to where the SAFENetwork now are, a test network for Storage Sharing (Vaults).
Is the MAIDSafe team really on the precipice of releasing the SAFENetwork DAO into the wild, end of this year or early in 2022? we will see.
The 2nd fact and challenge, imo, which is even more heady, proposed by me entirely is, why stick to a 50 year old protocol suite called TCP/IP, if SafeNetwork truly is InterNet 2.0?
Really the Internet 1.0 is broken is so many ways and TCP/IP, along with BGPsec, are the two stinkiest parts of Internet 1.0, each with plenty of performance and security problems.
To be fair, the above two facts are valid facts/market conditions/opportunities which mount up to big Challenges for any project currently creating and growing the crypto storage market, if, they are indeed, really in this market for the long haul (or just looking for a quick merger, exit.)
MAIDsafe the token, is the 1:1 swap precursor of the coming SAFEcoin, when the SAfenetwork goes live as a DAO later this year or early in 2022 (provided there are no development and operational setbacks), The project has stayed close to the TOP 100 unitl recently (see Coingecko MAIDsafe is currently now at #349), where the project has been in and out of that heady Top 100, which is now crowded (lots of DEFI projects that weren't there beginning of 2020) space the past two years. MAIFSafe is lightly traded and I personally think, a somewhat tightly held token, an Omincoin token (Like Tether of coloured coin fame) with limited liquidity, which frankly sees MAIDsafe not really traded on the mainstream central exchanges. I would call this 'condition' a protective strategy to keep the project going, while the finance part of the team plays the market to keep the project funded. The Maidsafe team is committed, focused, talented and does actually document what they are doing quite well, even if the commercial rigour is not say up to that of #CARDANO, which does quite a good job in that regard.
That said, even though MAIDsafe has fallen in the overall rankings and is technically at the bottom of the Storage 'Top Nine' Heap, the reality is the value of the MAIDSafe token has climbed steadily the past year, rewarding more recent hodlers investing in the past two years, post late 2017 crazy FOMO spike.
Personally, I think MAIDsafe will continue to rise, it's down a bit after the latest run on #BTC, albeit it will not rise at the same pace of the speculatively driven rises and falls we are seeing at the moment and, if the team is successful in launching the SAFENetwork DAO Distributed Autonomous System, with decent consumer value, there will be a price inflection point as more consumers discover the breadth of value the team at MAIDsafe and the SafeNetwork are really working on, likely in mid 2022, if everything stays on track. Liquidity though is still one of the open issues together with viable sustainable development ecosystem incentives, relative to other competitive offers in the same space. Hopefully the swap to SafeCoin in a different format will fix the MaideSafe Omnicoin liquidity problem.
Storage 101: A few Facts for Investors
Performance: OK where's the STORWIDTH beef? I need my CX (and first mover advantage) now!
OK let's face it, the current crypto storage speed is not AMZ ioOne commercial Enterprise Storage Service by any stretch. guaranteeing performance, up-time and reliability from a few MEGA-Huge Data Centres, spotted around the globe. This is story of mice vs. Thunder Lizards(soon to be Dinosaurs?)
Comparing distributed consumer grade storage from the crypto market versus enterprise cloud Storage seems a bit lame on the surface, however both employ similar technologies to get the job done, deployed in different ways.
StoreWidth: Is that a real term? Yup... Storage Capacity + Storage Bandwidth
Encryption and Crypto Storage: Yup, next feature..
Compression?
File systems with minimal amplification, to reduce the amount of defrag/de-duplication? Yes please.
Really fast near SSD media speed IOPS any one? Yes please, and add Block storage to that wish list.
Guaranteed Latency? Only over PCIe, cuz TCP/IP over Ethernet will never get you there to support streaming and game rendering with consistent quality.
Efficent Use of Distributed Storage Media: The True Cost of Distributed Storage
The 2nd Wave of Storewidth Tech: It's here and ready to play in the crypto space, or is it?
SmartContracts please with PoS validator Node incentives which drive wide distribution of the storage network.
Mergers and Acquisitions: A Crypto Storage Market Ripe for Consolidation, likely.
Will the energies behind these crypto storage plays seek to do what has traditionally happened in the past in the VC startup space led by Silicon and consolidate for profit?
Maybe, provided the VCs behind these plays can really get their collective business analyst heads around what is really going on here.
My head is still spinning...
Understanding the TKO Market Segment Analysis Bullseye Criteria
My view of the crypto world through a four faceted lens of TechVision, TEAM, RoadMap Reality, and Market Acceptance
What does it all mean?
Well the TKO BullsEye is relative ranking system, designed to quickly help TK and any crypto investor for that matter, understand what risk we are really addressing. The TKO BullsEye ID's the crypto effort as a set of rings on which the project may reside in whole or in part where the area of the rings represent four categories:
Leaders (Center) - Have all four aspects within their command and control, really ahead of the back
(First Broad Ring)- Possibly doing one or even two quadrants of the Leaders well, with some ork to do in the other quadrants
Hopefuls (Thin Ring)- On a whole One of the Quadrants is clearly better than the Challengers and will enter that Challengers ring in whole or in part, where the project in TK's estimation, has the potential to launch the project into the top challenger ring, provided the project get at least two of the other quadrants working to merit entry competitively in the challengers ring versus those projects doing enough now to merit their position in the challengers ring, now and, alos where the project is going in the future (roadmap reality quadrant) influenced.
Bright Ideas (Broad OuterRing) - Where a New or emerging project lives which has potential game changing ramifications in the TKO Bullseye competitive market in each quadrant in whole or in part, so in TK's mind, worth mentioning and watching
Also note, these opinions are my own, which are deeply lobbyist (BS and Techno-babble) resistant. Yeah I will hear a pitch and, yes facts and fair comparisons will see me shift my ring compositions. Those projects approaching me to gete my view/opinion, must please understand I am equipped with better than average X-ray vision, so don't take the outcome personally, it may not line up with your initial expectations. ;)
TK hint- Since my day job very much involves STOREWIDTH in the Cloud/Enterprise world of Storage, I watch this crypto market segment ever so closely. ;)
Otherwise the TKO Market Segment Analysis BullsEye is Very Much like a WindRose, where the relative ring positions, depths and coverage can change quite rapidly, relative to the competition, market acceptance and technoloy break thrus as well as changes in team composition, good and bad.
Since I first wrote this post #205 Ocean Protocol and #278 Phantasma where not in the Top nine, now they are..
So I will cover both in a special post, once I get my head around both.
The one that dropped out of the original top eight storage plays I was first studying back in May of 2021 is
#44 Theta Network, pivoted out of being categorised as 'storage' and are now Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) Entertainment also to be reviewed in a separate one off post, as #Theta Network is a different beast.....
That's all for now, if you read all of this then you truly are a real champ ;)
TK over and out!
