Aleph.im raises $10M to develop censorship-resistant data storage

The competition among the computing networks is warming up, with decentralized players coming into the stage with backing from the crypto ecosystem.

Decentralized storage and computing network Aleph.im completed a $10 million funding round led by Stratos Technologies. Zeeprime, NOIA Capital, Theia, Bitfwd Capital, Token Ventures and Seven Capital have contributed to the funding, among others. The cross-blockchain network aims to provide fully decentralized computing power and censorship-resistant data storage, according to the announcement.

Aleph.im scheduled its first computing resource node rollout for January following the funding round. The nodes would eventually become the decentralized network’s main processing power source.

Aleph.im rewards its core channel nodes with the network’s native token, ALEPH. The new funding would enable Aleph.im to increase its minimum wage payment capabilities from the current 70 core channel nodes to 150 node operators. This expansion aims to create a distributed virtual machine network to make full-stack decentralization possible for key blockchain and decentralized application (DApp) developers.

After kicking off the network’s computer nodes, Aleph.im also plans to activate storage nodes in 2022, according to Aleph.im founder Jonathan Schemoul. Decentralized storage would enable Web3 developers, DApps and protocols “to fully decentralize up to the last piece of their development stack,” he added.

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Stratos Technologies’ Rennick Palley noted that Web3 development would continue to rely on a small number of service providers until the full stack supporting compute and processing power is decentralized.

“Aleph.im’s efforts benefit the industry as a whole, and, for this reason, we are proud to be contributing to the larger effort and movement toward truly decentralized full-stack architecture.”

Last year, Aleph.im introduced a DApp to let users automatically back up the data underlying their nonfungible tokens. Gaming giant Ubisoft picked Aleph.im to participate in the sixth season of Ubisoft’s Entrepreneurs Lab. Despite facing backlash from the gaming community, Ubisoft joined the Aleph.im network as a channel node operator.