Tardigrade (Storj)

Tardigrade was the name Storj Labs gave to its decentralized storage service when it launched for commercial use around 2020, before the company moved to selling it under the Storj name. The name refers to the microscopic animal famed for surviving extreme conditions, a nod to the durability the service promised. Tardigrade offered storage similar to conventional cloud computing services and worked with common cloud storage tools, but instead of keeping data in company data centres it encrypted each file, split it into many pieces with erasure coding and spread them across thousands of independent storage nodes run by operators around the world. Customers paid for storage and bandwidth, and node operators were rewarded, in part with the STORJ token. Older guides and code may still use the Tardigrade name.