Of the huge number of cryptocurrencies that have hit the markets over the last one or two years, a few have stood out as potentially game-changing and, in turn, have attracted a large amount of investor attention and capital. One of these is Storj, a cloud hosting company that sought (and, to a degree, succeeded in its efforts) to bring a decentralized cloud hosting product to market.
Another entity, however, is trying to take what Storj has achieved and push it a step further – Internxt (INXT).
Internxt is billing itself as the next generation internet and while that's likely a little ambitious at this stage, it's not a completely unreasonable claim. The company intends to provide distributed cloud services that are attractive on both sides of the transaction from an end user perspective (that is, both customers and businesses) and it is harnessing blockchain technology to achieve this.
So why am I comparing it to Storj?
Well, because the first project to launch under the Internxt development umbrella is a decentralized peer-to-peer file storage network, similar (in some ways) to that which Storj has already launched. While the latter was a first mover in this regard, however, and has been able to prove the concept, Internxt has taken what Storj offers and improved on it; at least, that's what it intends to do when the platform launches come the second quarter of 2018.
How does it work?
In a centralized cloud storage system, data is stored on the servers of the company that's offering the storage space (Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Dropbox, etc.). With a decentralized storage system like that which Internxt is developing, individuals (so, anyone with a computer, an internet connection and a bit of free space) offer up storage space. Of course, if a host just stored the document (or whatever type of file is being stored) on their hard drive, there would be an issue with security. Internxt overcomes this, however, through the use of its peer to peer network. Basically, the company takes a file, breaks it into many little pieces and then stores individual pieces with the various hosts that make up the network. As such, no individual has access to the full file. When the creator of the file (the one that's paying for the cloud storage) wants to retrieve it, it's pieced back together and they are above to access it in its original state.
And this is where the company's token, INXT comes into the equation.
Hosts get paid in INXT for offering up their storage space and storing bits of the files that are being held in the cloud network. The more data they store, the higher the INXT payment.
As the platform increases in popularity, then, and the company's customer base increases, demand for INXT should increase, raising its price on the major exchanges across which it trades.
So how is this different to the existing options?
As compares to Google and Dropbox, and as already mentioned, it's decentralized. This increased security and dramatically reduces exposure to vulnerability (read: hacking). As compares to something like Storj, Internxt has designed its platform to be far simpler, more lightweight and cheaper to the end user.
This means it's a sort of best of both worlds situation. Those who require storage aren’t having to forego the security of a decentralized system to get the ease of use and affordability of one.
So what comes next and what can we look for as supportive of a bull thesis on this coin?
The company intends to launch an Alpha version of its cloud storage system, X Cloud, with all of its core infrastructure code in place, before the end of January 2018. By the end of April, the first version Beta release of X Cloud for Windows, OS X, Android, and IOS should be available.
A full stable release for all of the just mentioned platforms should be available by the end of May.
Keep in mind that this is a young project and that any exposure to what Internxt is trying to achieve is a speculative one at this stage. With that said, however, and as far as exposures in this space go, the product, team, and community all look strong which serves to mitigate a large portion of said risk.