This article was originally published on The Daily Chain, 17th March 2021.
ScPrime ($SCP) offers business-class data storage in a sharing economy.
“ScPrime runs an open and permission-less decentralized cloud storage network that offers inexpensive archival cloud storage.”
Storage Mining
ScPrime enables anyone to rent unused disk space for a fee. These “contractors” are known as storage miners and earn compensation for their participation.
If this sounds familiar that’s because in 2018 ScPrime began as a fork of Siacoin ($SC) and broke away in a community led effort after Siacoin began producing proprietary hardware, held anathema by many to the goal of decentralization. Siacoin holders received an airdrop, and the projects went their separate ways.
ScPrime has long since forged its own path, and will soon offer full compatibility with Amazon’s S3 API and provide technology which enables businesses to utilize the robust and affordable ScPrime network while having the flexibility to move to other platforms using the industry S3 standard.
“It’s a very big job because in many ways, we are rewriting the largest section of Sia coding and we have to make compatible all the stuff that makes AWS great.”
Kenneth Scott Bell, ScPrime founder
Similarly, businesses and individuals currently using S3 compliant storage, most notably Amazon itself, can migrate to ScPrime.
Team
A recent website makeover provides a fresh look for ScPrime, and is accompanied by team details.
Kenneth Scott Bell leads an international team of experienced developers, engineers, and doctoral researchers. He himself has spent over 20 years leading product development in related sectors.
Ian Ravenscroft acts as advisor, and his reputation lends a good deal of clout to ScPrime.
“Over 30 years in Telecommunications & Financial Services, over 10 years of investing in & supporting start up blockchain projects such as MCO, SIA, XEM, ARDOR and now SCP.”
Additional advisors from a group of 15 angel investors are expected to be added to the website soon.
ScPrime Team
Passive Income
With all the buzz surrounding DeFi and passive income, ScPrime makes a strong case for storage mining being a better form of passive income, with little to no downside, and in a sector experiencing exponential growth.
“Becoming a Storage Provider with ScPrime allows you to stake the SCP cryptocurrency in smart contracts created to provide storage on the network. Coins are locked into contracts as collateral against you performing the job of storing data for customers on the network.”
The Relayer
As one community member put it, The Relayer is “basically the heart of ScPrime’s distributed data center.”
The Relayer is the name of ScPrime’s S3 compatible client software that Enterprise customers access through whatever toolset they are currently familiar with
Bell explained it to The Daily Chain.
“S3 is an AWS product (Simple Storage Service) that includes a full API the industry has adopted as an ad hoc protocol. Essentially if you want to be in enterprise grade object storage, you need to be as compatible with this “protocol” as possible.
“Our focus from the start has been to build out a client stack with a high degree of S3 compatibility and more specifically, to work directly with software developers in the S3 ecosystem.
“Our primary benefit over the S3 service is thousands of datacenters with strong distribution globally. Just yesterday, a large datacenter with a facility in France burned to the ground and millions of websites were taken offline.
“The Distributed Datacenter scatters data over a giant mesh of storage providers such that a large number can fail and there is little impact on the network as a whole.
“The crypto is primarily a frictionless way to pay them.”
The Year Ahead
When asked what to expect from ScPrime this year in terms of both development and marketing, Bell responded.
“We are beta testing the new Relayer, which is the backbone of our product.
“Our go-to-market product is enterprise backups and the Relayer is currently working with Veeam and Commvault, two premier storage partners in the space that combined handle as much as 80% of business backup and disaster recovery. We plan to launch the product in Q2, a bit delayed but in the space we’re focused on, you can’t not work.”
“We are also progressing on a Storage Appliance with the middleware almost completed and we hope to launch at the end of next month. The appliance will let anyone become a provider on the SCP network and earn passive income with little to no tech experience needed. Just plug it in and watch the coins come in. The company expects to subsidize these storage miners to ensure a quick and guaranteed ROI.
“Marketing focus will be on the product launch in traditional storage channels. I don’t expect much, if any coin marketing as our thing is about building a real product.”
Today roughly ten percent of the network’s one petabyte capacity is being used, and is hosted by over 100 active workers. For Bell this represents a “solid proof of concept”, and he’s expecting these numbers to “explode”.
The technical achievements of ScPrime are particularly impressive when considering that, unlike many competitors like Arweave ($AR), it has not collected tens of millions of dollars in funding to develop their product, which Bell told The Daily Chain was sixty percent complete with the release scheduled for Q2.
Marketing
While focused on engineering a good product ScPrime aims its marketing efforts in the data storage sector.
Business customers, the target market for ScPrime, can enter into agreements with SCP Corp to ease adoption and manage relations, as detailed in an official blog post.
“Providers enter into contracts primarily with SCP, Corp for sales to business customers, but also with community users with data to store. Through this contract, SCP is exchanged between the host and renter on a continuing basis until the contract is concluded.”
The market capitalization of ScPrime is dwarfed by some of its competitors, with Siacoin and Arweave valued fifty and sixty times more respectively. Despite this ScPrime will likely be the first to market with a fully S3 compatible decentralized product ready for enterprise and business adoption.
