Bin Zhu speaks about Stratos on QuickSwap X Space, January 12th, 2024🔗︎
[Click] to listen. (Starts at 2:13:50).
Bin Zhu, if we could have you introduce yourself.
Thank you. My name is Bin Zhu. I'm the founder of Stratos. I'm very happy to have heard a lot of talk about the storage, mainly about the performance and about the CDN. We just talked about that, actually. That's what Stratos already accomplished.
Bin is the one that, guys, I mentioned. I was asking a question on a random thread about DePIN, and he was actually the one who answered it. So good to have you.
Thank you. Stratos was started in 2021. Actually, before, I worked for the web2, for almost 20 years. I fully understand how web2 works. And when I started Stratos, I realized, oh, web2 is so powerful because it has a very strong backbone. It's the cloud.
But web3 doesn't have that. They only have blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that is powerful, but they cannot do everything. That's why we decided to create Stratos.
At Stratos, we started to deliver the storage. After that, we will start working on the computation this year, and then we will work on the database. The same thing as the centralized cloud.
People always need to find a way to store something like video, like image, like NFT, or a document. When you save your data, then you will realize, oh, I have my video, I need to stream that. Or maybe I need to encode my video. Maybe I need to process my picture. This is what the second requirement is: I want to process. Okay.
Then the Computation is doing that work. After the computation, they will get some clean data, structured data. Where will they save it? They will save it to the database. That's why Stratos milestones are storage, computation, and database. We will solve the problem step by step. That's what we do. That's what Stratos does.
Then the people will talk about the performance. People always talk like: Yeah. Decentralized storage will probably never compete with centralized storage, but fortunately, we did some benchmarks on Stratos.
Stratos main network, just launched in September 2023, actually three, four months ago. But right now we already have more than 500 nodes across 20 countries. And right now the total storage capacity is more than four petabytes.
And we did some benchmarks. We compare it with Google Drive. Everyone uses Google Drive, so we compare it with Google Drive. Our performance, it doesn't matter if it’s downloading or uploading, our performance was always compatible with them, sometimes even faster than them.
Also recently we cooperate with several AI projects. The reason they want to work with us, because Stratos really provides a decent, efficient storage solution for them. The main reason is the edge. I really like the edge, because when we talk about the decentralized, we don't talk the edge, but edge is very important. Edge computing, edge storage. The AI project, they provide the GPUs. They wanted the GPU to feed the data and train the AI model.
But the GPU could be located anywhere because it's a decentralized network. It could be in the US, Europe, or maybe Asia. But where the data comes from, they're not sure. That's why most of the time the GPU is waiting for the data to trend. So most of the time, GPUs have nothing to do.
But Stratos is purely decentralized. It's all in the edge with the GPUs. So the GPU will be much more efficient to get the data from Stratos. So that's why they like to cooperate with us. Okay, that's one use case. Actually, we're working now and we already have several partners with us.
The other use case we're doing right now with third party is called decentralized Dropbox. The people, they don't trust the Google Drive or Apple iCloud, because of the censorship. Some people really want to use some secure platform. But the public cloud, they always have censorship or other regulations. So we are working on the decentralized Dropbox. So when you have your own decentralized Dropbox, you don't worry about your content anymore. You don't worry that they will scan your data, they will scan your image.
No, you don't have to worry that they will delete or block your account. No, because you have your own key. As long as you have your own key, you will always be the owner of your content. As they say, not your key, not your crypto. From our side, we say, not your key, not your content. That's the second use case.
The third one is CDN. We just mentioned the CDN, decentralized CDN. Actually Stratos is working on that. We will deliver the decentralized CDN very soon. How will that work? People can just upload video or audio on the Stratos network, because the performance of the network is good. So people don't need to download the video or the audio before they play it. They can directly stream it like TikTok or YouTube does.
So yeah, that is already accomplished. And we will start working, looking for more partners and work together with them. We want to show the world how decentralized storage, how decentralized computation can change the way people work. And we also want people, not only crypto community, also the traditional world, traditional industry to learn about this.
Some people are saying, okay, it’s very hard for traditional businesses to adapt to the crypto world. But I talked to some business, I talked to some friends, they didn’t say that they don't like crypto. They like it, but they really don't have some very useful infrastructure they can use.
They lack no censorship, they lack the ability to control the content by themselves. They just didn't find a good one to use in this case.
Actually we had a conversation a long time ago with a big company in the UK. They always save their data on AWS, but they're storing personal, very personal data. They don't like to take that responsibility. Because, the public cloud, sometimes they have issues, maye sometimes they will leak data. So they talked with us. They asked if we could work with them and store their personal, very personal information on Stratos as well. And right now we still have conversations with them. One day when Stratos network will be bigger. Now we have 500 nodes, maybe when we have 1000 nodes, 2000 nodes, we probably could talk with them again to say, okay, now we are ready to take your data.
Sounds like you guys are doing a lot there. Um, I appreciate the explanation about what Stratos is doing, where you guys have come, everything you have built.