Sure, sustainability is a hot topic today … but we started the conversation a long time ago. In fact, our founder Shawn Wilkinson discovered a more earth-friendly way to enable a cryptographic system—while mining bitcoin in his dorm room at Morehouse College.
“Why not employ underutilized computing resources to provide true utility, instead of consuming scarce resources to solve math problems?”
And so the Storj decentralized model was born. Our platform comprises thousands of underutilized hard drives around the globe, operating as “nodes” for our network—rather than traditional, expensive-to-build-and-operate data centers. Here’s the upshot for the environment: By enabling a terabyte of storage to be stored on an existing, running drive with spare capacity rather than using a new drive, we can dramatically reduce our carbon footprint.
Another fun fact we learned in a recent survey we sent to our node operators: 69% of respondents said that Storj DCS capacity is deployed on hardware originally intended for other purposes. (Source: 2021 Storage Node Operator Survey). Talk about adaptive reuse!
You can learn more about our green architecture—and see more survey results—in our recent e-book, “Saving More Than Just Files.” There’s a lot more information about our commitment to the environment in the e-book, which is free to download here. Go ahead and get it—and learn about the steps we have taken to make us a more engaged corporate citizen, advanced technological partner, and a better place to attract and retain talent. The future is green—and so are we.
