Protobox: Your Gateway to Decentralized Object Storage

What is Protobox?

Protobox is a decentralized object storage product and OSS tooling suite that makes it easy for users familiar with Web2 object storage solutions to access the inherent benefits of distributed storage networks - increased resilience, redundancy and censorship resistance.

Quick Links

Swarm Summit Talk | Livepeer Grant | Documentation

Overview

Web2 - Centralized Cloud Storage

The current S3 object storage market is heavily centralized. Amazon’s S3 enterprise object storage solution has over 900,000 users. This represents roughly a 93% market share [^1] in a $4.83 billion dollar market with a compound annual growth of 13.6%. [^2]

Centralized hosting exposes user content to increased censorship risks. Decentralized storage has already been praised in the U.S. Congress by Sen. Pat Toomey for protecting the free press in China. [^3]

Centralized hosting can provide fault tolerance, high availability and redundancy - provided users pay extremely high premiums for these services.

Web3 - Decentralized Cloud Storage

Decentralized storage options are designed to address the issues mentioned above. However - In order to encourage more users to incorporate decentralized storage, we need to address the following key friction points.

For End Users

• UI/UX quality varies greatly in Web3. Interfaces must be intuitive for Web2 users.
• Fiat onramps/cross-chain bridges often come with a learning curve - which not everyone has the time and patience for.

For Developers/Storage Management

• Decentralized storage protocols lack native compatibility with existing software solutions.
• Payment and storage management is complicated and difficult to integrate.

Our Solutions

Protobox exists as an active response to the above considerations and our roadmap of tools and integrations is continually evolving.

What we've achieved so far (Q1-Q2 2023)

Our initial product offering is S3 API tooling that enables data transfer between S3-compatible storage endpoints/vendors and the decentralized Swarm Network. Our gateway has been tested and technically demonstrated to the Ethereum Swarm grants committee.

Roadmap (Q3 2023 and beyond)

We are currently working on the following implementations:

• Migration Tool: Migrates existing S3 compatible storage to Ethereum Swarm.
• GUI/UX: Easy user interface for managing Swarm storage.
• Payment integrations/balance monitoring: Integrated fiat onramp solutions with automated postage stamp creation and renewal/top-up, simplified storage cost calculator, simplified bandwidth cost calculator and options to enable pre-payment of bandwidth cost on behalf of end users.
• Livepeer integration: The Protobox team is working closely with Livepeer to enable data transfer between the Livepeer protocol and the Ethereum Swarm network. This integration will allow Livepeer users to both record and playback content from the Swarm network. More details on our grant from Livepeer can be found here.

Funding/Grants

We are proud to be developing these solutions with the assistance of grants from Ethereum Swarm and Livepeer. Public goods rounds like this are our only supplementary funding source - so any contribution you can make is immensely appreciated and goes directly to helping us develop OSS tooling and integrations in support of data and content decentralization.

If you like what we stand for - please help where you can and share our page!

References

[^1]: “Amazon s3 - Market Share, Competitor Insights in Enterprise Data Storage.” Slintel, https://www.slintel.com/tech/enterprise-data-storage/amazon-s3-market-share. Accessed 25 January 2023.

[^2]: “The Cloud Object Storage Market in 2022.” Enterprise Storage Forum, 16 May 2022, https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/cloud/cloud-object-storage-market/. Accessed 25 January 2023.

[^3]: “Cryptocurrencies: What are they good for? | United States Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.” hearing | Hearings | United States Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, 27 July 2021, https://www.banking.senate.gov/hearings/cryptocurrencies-what-are-they-good-for. Accessed 25 January 2023.

"Web2 vs Web3." Ethereum Development Documentation, September 26, 2022, https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/web2-vs-web3/#web3-limitations. Accessed 10 August 2023.