Skynet

Skynet is a decentralised platform for storing and serving files and web applications, built on top of Sia, a blockchain-based cloud storage network. It was developed by Skynet Labs, a company founded by members of the Sia team, and launched publicly in 2020. Users uploaded files to Sia's network of independent storage hosts through Skynet portals, and each file received a short identifier called a skylink, which anyone could use to fetch it from any portal. Developers used it to host websites and decentralised apps without relying on a single cloud computing provider, an approach often linked to Web3. Skynet is often compared with the InterPlanetary File System, which uses a similar idea of content-based addressing, though Skynet paid storage hosts through Sia's own token. Its activity declined from 2022 onward. The name is also the fictional artificial intelligence in the Terminator films.