What is Decentralized Storage? (IPFS, FileCoin, Sia, Storj & Swarm)

Decentralized storage has fascinated me for a while after coming across the Filecoin ICO which raised over $250M dollars with leading investors such as Y Combinator, Naval Ravikant, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures Sequoia and Winklevoss Capital. Considering how much they raised, there must have been a reason as to why industry leaders are betting on its success so I started to read more into the protocol it uses: Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) and understand what other projects in the space are doing.

What is Decentralisation + Storage?

Decentralization is understood as the transfer of authority from a central entity to a more localised and ‘liberal’ system. The concept itself has been around for awhile and an earlier concept could be paralleled to the introduction of the Internet where the spread of information was democratised. The term is now being coined against Blockchain technologies and applications such as Bitcoin and Ethereum which decentralise financial transactions and computing power.

Storage is defined as the retention of retrievable data on a computer or other electronic system. We use storage on a daily basis from the mobile phone and computers we use and it is easily understood from the files we put onto a USB stick. From the…