 You are watching the Daily Decrypt. Welcome to Currency Competition. I'm your host, Amanda, and today's episode is brought to you by Crypto Compare. Storage is the name of a peer-to-peer network that hopes to compete in the cloud storage market with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Drive, and even Dropbox. Unlike these other services, however, the storage network stores customers' files on the unused disk space of various individuals making up the peer-to-peer network. The users providing that disk space are called farmers, and they're getting paid storage coins for their service. The network is in its final stages of testing and is expected to launch its first customer-oriented web app soon. First, let's examine how files are stored on storage's network. Individuals who have unused hard disk space they'd be willing to rent out to the network download a program called DriveShare. They then tell DriveShare how much disk space and how much bandwidth they're willing to lend out to the network. This person then becomes a farmer, which is the equivalent of a miner in Bitcoin, and their paid storage coins commensurate to how much customer data they host. How does this system work? In a unique selling point when compared to centralized services, the farmers have zero access to the data they're hosting. They're not able to view or alter it, and in fact, no farmer even has a complete copy of any file hosted on the network. This is because files uploaded to storage are first broken up into pieces and encrypted on the customer's own computer before the file is sent out to any farmers for hosting. Storage customers choose how many farmers they would like to host their data and how long they would like them to do so. This contract remains in effect so long as the customer makes the proper micro payments throughout the lifetime of the file's storage. If a customer stops paying, their files will simply be forgotten from the network. So what is this network's status now? The storage team today announced that they had surpassed 2,000 terabytes in storage capacity, with almost 800 farmers contributing to it. Farmers currently supplying the most disk space to the storage network are in the 25 terabyte range, and those supplying the least are offering up just a quarter of a gig. These 800 farmers are all in Test Group B, and while they're being paid in real storage coins for their efforts, they're not yet hosting real customer data. And speaking of payment, the network's currency, Storage Coin, is worth about two U.S. cents per coin. It's technically a colored bitcoin, meaning it's a token that lives on the bitcoin blockchain via the counterparty protocol. 500 million storage coins exist, most of them are currently in one address, and they're being paid out gradually to incentivize more farmers and more disk space as the network prepares for full launch. So what is next for storage? Well, it's taken almost two years to build up to the current network capacity. Lead developer Sean Wilkinson has announced that Test Group C will execute next. Anyone can join this test group and be paid real storage coins. The pre-requisites are downloading DriveShare and having 10,000 storage coins to start, which can be purchased on various online exchanges. And once Test Round C is over, will Storage Coin begin accepting its first customers? If so, it will become the world's first decentralized cloud storage network. Pretty cool. Today's episode is brought to you by Crypto Compare, a social site which offers user-written reviews and ratings for all of the top cryptocurrencies and mining hardware, as well as comparison charts and tutorials. Take their Bitcoin and Ethereum knowledge quizzes. Feel free to post your score in the comments below. I'll tell you mine. And you can find that all at Cryptocompare.com. Sponsorship of the Daily Decrypt is hot, fast, and cheap. Learn more about it by clicking the little bar you probably see somewhere displaying in your video right now. Or just visit thedailydecrypt.com slash sponsorship. Have a good day.