Interview with Jason Coppola, CEO of Opacity Storage
This transcript covers many questions of our last ask-me-anything session with Jason Coppola, the CEO of Opacity Storage — 5th February 2021, hosted on Opacity’s YouTube Channel.
Watch the full recorded video here:
Jason, can you give us a short introduction about yourself?
My name is Jason Coppola, CEO of Opacity. Just to give you a quick overview for anybody who’s new — Opacity is an online storage provider for private storage, so I think it’s important to kick off with a little bit of the use case that we’re trying to solve because I think people are unclear sometimes when they hear about Opacity.
The core concern for me is you share your account personal information with accounts that you sign up with online every day, so whether it’s Facebook, social media or other online storage providers, anything you do — they’re asking for your name, for your personal information, your address, email — and they can use that information either to sell and make money, or a hacker can get it and put you in some kind of jeopardy, whether that’s physical or financial, your friends and family — They can really reach out and do things to you that you don’t want them to do.
I will give you a prime example: we all know the ledger live hack that happened six months ago. I got this email in December from them that said: oh, we think that a lot of information was shared online. I guess a week after that, I got a home invasion threat in my email with my home address, threatening me to pay them before they could show up at my door, which I didn’t take very seriously, but we don’t want these things to happen in reality.
That’s what Opacity’s doing: we don’t collect your information. Discussions about decentralization will come and they’re important, but regardless of decentralization the most important thing for me is keeping you, our users, out of the equation. The transactions you do with Opacity don’t have anything to do with your personal information or your credit cards.
Tell us about yourself, how did you get involved in crypto.
Like most people, I think it was when things started to move up in 2017.
I have been in tech for 25 years so I was interested in Bitcoin even earlier, like 2011. 2012 I was going to set up a mining server, and like maybe a lot of people, if I would have at the time, I would be retired by now.
I didn’t get to do it because of other commitments and regretted it later, but 2017 came around, I started to look at the industry and honestly invested in some companies and some of them — I said “I could be doing this, I’d like to be doing this, I would like to be either part of the team or doing my own project”. And this project, Opacity, appealed to me.
Like I said in my intro, protecting your identity, protecting my identity is very important to me and I felt like this was a big way to do that.
What are the strong and the weak points of Opacity? What is the competitive landscape now?
Opacity’s strong point is having really secure protection for identity, we have strong encryption on files. We have the whole framework in place to actually support the structure of a secured data platform, as well as identity protection. Some of the weaknesses might be decentralization because a lot of people are looking at that, and why aren’t we decentralized while our competitors are already decentralized?
Well, they got a big jump on us, Filecoin has been around for six years, they raised 220 million dollars two or three years ago and they finally have a product. If we had 200 million dollars Opacity would be through the roof already. They just came out with their platform recently and it’s still not something that I would like to jump up and down about. I don’t think any of the competitors have taken the lead.
We’re in the market already with something that’s user-friendly. People, who are not familiar with crypto, can jump in right away. That was part of my strategy as well, make it really user-friendly, anybody can use it — Grandma can use it, teenager can use it, students can use it: Anybody who needs to jump in and have some secured data. It is ready to go out of the box. You don’t even need crypto for the free account.
So those are some of the strengths and weaknesses. I can’t think of many other weaknesses other than it’s going to take time and money and effort for the team to put things together. Another project, Siacoin is a mining platform, they actually sold miner hardware so that they earned money and they did get a round of funding also last year which was great for them, it shows there is an interest in the market. I think we’re doing the right thing.
What would you say to those who say Opacity isn’t real crypto?
It’s funny because I can go pay for the service with crypto right now. So, few things…
One is anonymity, because crypto is anonymous you can buy it and pay for things with it and if you do it right people won’t know who you are.
Two, it’s pegged to storage so that there’s an identifiable quantity when you have one OPCT token you can go on our platform and buy 64 gigabytes of storage.
Third, which is the future, is that decentralized payment, so the payment method for the network has to be through crypto. Otherwise, it’s not anonymous, first of all. Second of all, we can’t split up the funds and make them move quickly enough across a network if we were using just US Dollars or something else, so it’s an essential part of the network and supporting us in the long run.
When approaching decentralization do you lean towards building it based on the existing solution or are you aiming for becoming a leading example of innovation in the field?
Storage is a physical commodity. We are dealing with files that need to be stored and held in systems that are persistent, redundant, reliable, and performant. All these things need to exist. If we need it built — and it’s going to be innovative — we’re gonna do it. If it is something we could leverage, that we can use other platforms for, maybe a hybrid model where we have our own system using other platforms — we are totally open to that. That is why we built the front end first, because the back end should be agnostic. We can use AWS, we can use storage nodes that are public, and we can pay them, or we could even use Siacoin’s infrastructure when they open up a system, where we can put files on and pay them, too. We are agnostic to where files are stored.
What kind of marketing strategies do you have in mind?
We have already started being more active in our social-media channels: Telegram, Reddit, Twitter and Discord. We are doing this AMA and definitely will be doing more direct communication with the community like this. We also are in contact with few media outlets that are interested in Opacity, so there will be a few publications in the near future and we will be running more community promotions, so community involvement is very much welcome.
Join the Opacity Infographic Contest with a total prize pool of 10,000 OPCT (~$639, 02/24/21).
What is Opacity’s unique selling points compared to other storage projects with a higher market capitalization?
First and foremost, it is the complete privacy option when paying with an OPCT token. Opacity doesn’t ask for your information or any data at all. We focused on not tying metadata or files to you, so there’s no connection whatsoever once it’s uploaded and it’s encrypted. It is off of your radar, off of your connection, no one can see that file — even if someone got access to the file through decryption, it would not hold any information about whoever uploaded the file. It is not there, it doesn’t exist.
That is protection that I don’t think anyone really provides out of the box, because they’re not structured to do that.
What are the next big milestones?
Right now, the two biggest developments that are coming in the next 30 to 45 days are:
One, the white paper, that everybody wants to see in terms of future decentralization developments.
Number two is a revamp of the website and the web app.
Users will enjoy the modern look and feel of the new interface with better icon, better feedback when files are uploading and downloading. So, it will be a lot more in line with traditional storage providers — still keeping it simple, but better layout and user journey.
We are building a platform for developers to power their own applications based on Opacity. These are some that exist now, so everybody should go check that out — the links are available directly on the website.
We are going to have a blog on the site, so instead of medium you will be
able to read the latest news in a nice magazine layout directly on the website.
OCELOT — Advanced File Management
IMGOPCT — Image Sharing
OPACITY HANDLE SHORTENER — Link Shortener
OPACITY DESKTOP APPLICATION — Desktop File Management
As for the whitepaper, we are doing it as fast as we can, and I would love to share dates if people were not getting too attached to them.
One very cool feature we are working on right now is being able to share things with a public shareable link including a preview. The reason why you cannot go on Facebook or Twitter right now and put an opacity link is that it is encrypted and enabled for one-to-one sharing only. We have to create a public version of a file that can be shared on all platforms for it to go eventually viral.
That is something we’ve just nailed down recently and we are working on introducing it with the new version of the website.
How can the community support the project?
The community has been great so far — Keep sharing! Tell everybody you know, go tell your friends, share it on Twitter, share it on Facebook, we’re going to get the new site up and that’s going to be a really great moment to showcase what we’re doing.
What is the status of the development of the new metadata system?
Connor is working on that right now. He’s definitely been making improvements on the upload and download speeds, which is really going to be helpful for everyone in the browser interaction. Because the browser is really where a lot of the magic happens on upload, especially when you’re doing encryption.
Expect a release with the website, early March.
The fees for storage are super low, how are you able to provide such a service?
Our utility token OPCT represents the value of the storage in the network right now. We’ve known it’s been low for a while for several reasons: bear market last year, Oyster issues in our past that we’ve resolved with Bruno being arrested. All of these issues were slowing us down.
But now we’ve got clear skies — we’re developing and building the network that will help support this.
I have been supporting it personally, I have had my funds put in the company and paying for storage and hosting. It hasn’t been that exorbitant, because the storage usage was low, but over time it’s building up and so we’re trying to get it on par with other providers.
What happens to your files when your membership expires?
We have a grace period of about three months where you can renew your account and the files won’t cease to exist.
I highly suggest you renew before the expiration — that would be the best way to not lose anything.
We are an anonymous provider, I don’t want your email, so we might provide reminders as an option. Right now, put it in your digital calender and it’ll pop up once a year a month ahead of the deadline and say: “renew Opacity now” with a link to our website.
Why would someone use Opacity today when they could use AWS?
You can absolutely use AWS, if you trust Amazon not to obtain and use your personal information. It is also not user friendly and definitely not developed for the end-user like Opacity that anyone can use right now.
Will there be a direct on-ramp to purchase OPCT?
We want to be careful about being what’s called a money exchanger. This has a lot of legal repercussions and we’d be under a lot of requirements in the industry, like a bank, and we don’t want to be that.
Right now, we enabled Uniswap which was a big reason for our token swap — so we can actually get on decentralized exchanges.
In a few months, we are going to introduce the mobile app. It’ll be on the go in your pocket, you will be able to sync your photos, videos, files — just like with Google drive — and you should be able to swap tokens with a connection to Uniswap, as well.
Opacity Liquidity Rewards Program
Join the Opacity Liquidity Rewards Program and Earn OPCT!
What does adding liquidity to Uniswap mean for Opacity?
We have put a few million OPCT there as well as ETH — the ETH came from my own pool. I wanted to make sure there was enough liquidity to reduce the price gap. When you have low liquidity, your spread can be very wide, which influences the trade — People do not want to trade on that kind of spread, moving the price quickly just to buy some tokens to pay for storage on Opacity, there shouldn’t be such a gap on a utility token.
We are also introducing a special liquidity program, rewarding people for providing liquidity to the platform on Uniswap, because it is better for the token price and stability. People who are interested in getting a lot of OPCT, if they want to hold on to it for utility, can start participating in the Opacity Liquidity Rewards Program now.
Any plans to reach out to enterprises and offer them Opacity storage?
Yes, sure, it is absolutely the next stage after we make the product more user friendly and introduce all the developments we have been talking about earlier.
As we branch out, we are starting more on the consumer-side: That’s what the mobile app will help us with, to get more consumer-level engagement and involvement.
And then branching out into more business-to-business with small and large businesses.
Are there any plans on introducing staking?
Staking will be part of the decentralized system, because it’s basically collateral for users: if you’re hosting a node, you’re holding people’s files — and you turn it off one day and don’t come back, people’s files disappear. There needs to be a penalty.
Staking will give you something in return, you’ll get a benefit for basically being a storage provider earning some interest on the staking while it is in a lock box. Should the storage provider leave prematurely, the stake is forfeited to compensate the network.
About Opacity
Founded in 2018, Opacity Storage is dedicated to online data privacy and security. Online data breaches continue to be a major consumer risk. Opacity is reducing this risk by removing the need to provide personal payment data and by decentralizing files stored online. For more information, visit opacity.io and follow @Opacity_Storage on Twitter.
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