FileZilla – Storj Labs Collaboration’s 4 Years later
Four years ago I was head-down looking for a potential partner for FileZilla. We wanted to empower our users and bring more value to all our stakeholders. Given FileZilla’s unmatched ability to deliver file transfer capabilities, it was natural to look into the cloud storage space.
As FileZilla is distributed under a Free and Open Source license, it was natural to want to partner with a like-minded company or organization.
Much of my previous experience at the time was helping companies and organizations evaluate Open Source projects’ sustainability. So all I did was to analyse all the Open Source initiatives focusing on the cloud.
The candidates we discovered were limited to Filecoin, MaidSafe, Sia and Storj Labs. As you know, we decided to bet on the latter, despite the fact they were less funded than others. As explained in a previous post, the reason was simply they were a more mature Open Source project, and as such, it was well positioned to become the first Distributed Cloud Storage platform to leverage blockchain technology and deliver enterprise-grade service level agreements.
Did we do our homework right?
Let’s have a deeper look at Storj’s rivals. Filecoin ran an amazing ICO, and from a financial point of view they look like a great partner. On a more technical note, Filecoin went live just a few days ago, though.
MaidSafe isn’t in a better spot. Alphas got named fleming and baby fleming, yet despite the efforts and the advancements they are still far from realizing their promises.
Last but not least Sia, later renamed Skynet, is finally making interesting progress, like their recently launched SkyDB, and the company behind it (Nebolous) six years later is getting investors’ attention.
Years later it’s clear we made the right choice by sticking with the less-funded, technically advanced Storj Labs. By doing so we’ve been able to enable developers beta testing Storj since July 2017, and we never stopped updating the FileZilla-Storj integration. Eventually this summer we moved to a ready-for-prime-time phase releasing Tardigrade.
The FileZilla/Storj collaboration has been a win-win. Storj has been able to tap into our huge user base, while the FileZilla project has secured the necessary funds to keep investing in developing its client and server.
The FileZilla project and Storj Labs utilized each other’s audiences for a profit, empowering users with easy access to a secure distributed cloud. All stakeholders got their due share of value added, in a positive-sum game.
And we are still at the very beginning of all this, stay tuned for upcoming features unveiling the potential of our partnership by making super easy to share files confidentially with your peers!
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