Our History.
Discover our history and road ahead: Key innovations in decentralized cloud storage.
The Start.
June 2017
In June 2017, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Saswata Basu and Tom Austin, a Computer Science Professor at San Jose State University, embarked on a mission to revolutionize cloud storage. Their goal: to create a next-generation platform that safeguards data against internal breaches, empowers users with full data ownership and control, ensures privacy, enables encrypted sharing, and facilitates secure collaboration—all with unparalleled performance and 100% dynamic availability.
Private Token Sale.
Jan 2018
The Züs Token Sale quickly attracted a lot of interest from crypto and IT enthusiasts, data center operators, and traditional crypto miners. Because of overwhelming interest, the team picked a mix of users from different geolocations and backgrounds so that the project has a strong base of decentralized support over the years.
The First Network - Fastest finality .
August 2018
Successfully ran a private blockchain on AWS consisting of 100 miners and 30 sharders. Blazing speed with the fastest block finality in the world, producing blocks in less than a half second and accommodating more than 1000 transactions in a block.
100 Miners
30 Sharders
Sub Second Finality
Global Development.
Sep 2019
Team moved out of Silicon Valley and recruited globally to reduce cost with a more diverse team. Contributors from India, Pakistan, Israel, Australia, U.K., Ukraine, Poland, Egypt, Portugal, and different cities in the U.S. and Canada.
Consumer Apps - Atlus, Bolt and Vult.
2020
Building the ecosystem needed some basic apps to highlight the usability of blockchain storage with any Web2 applications. One re-invention idea was to design a better alternative to Google Drive and Dropbox—the Vult—offering user ownership and control of the location of their data, performance, and security, as well as easy encrypted data sharing with absolute privacy. Atlus and Bolt are typical blockchain apps that enable users to view blockchain transactions and stats, and send or stake tokens, respectively.
NFT App - Chalk.
2021
NFT sales reached a peak in August 2021, but there were two problems: a) non-performant storage and b) absence of context. Chalk enables artists to use Züs’ high-performance storage and offers a quality image of their creation and a story to enhance it. A single NFT image can now be a story like TikTok or Instagram, allowing creators to add value and amplify their work by adding their first sketch, first draft, and a video explainer to better connect with their collectors.
Perpetual NFTs
Enterprise Apps - Blimp and Chimney.
2022
With Chimney, an entrepreneur can start a storage provider business by renting or building a server from scratch, much like Uber or Airbnb, although at a much lower investment of time and money. Blimp is an enterprise data management platform that enables enterprises to use Züs as an alternative S3 storage with better security, privacy, availability, resilience, design flexibility, data integrity, performance, UI, and user experience.
MainNet Live.
Dec 24, 2023
On Christmas Eve, the Züs blockchain went live with a distributed group of miners, sharders, blobbers, validators, and authorizers. This was a momentous occasion for a next generation storage protocol with more than 25,000 GitHub developer commits over six years. Within months it had surpassed Ethereum and Bitcoin in the number of blocks generated.
First Hard Fork - Apollo.
Jan 2024
The first hard fork was perfectly executed within a month of the launch. It fixed a few smart contracts and blockchain bugs successfully without a glitch. This is a major achievement, considering Ethereum took 11 months in comparison.
Geo-diversity.
Feb 2024
Enabled geolocation diversity so that the user starts with a diverse group of servers for their storage allocation. Users can later add or replace servers on the fly and conduct automatic repair of their allocation.
Add or Replace servers, providers.
Mar 2024
Enhance availability and content distribution by adding providers, or optimize performance by replacing them
Brand and Permissioned Blobbers for Private Cloud.
Apr 2024
The Permission protocol enables a blobber to restrict usage to specific clients. The Brand protocol enables users to select a particular brand of blobbers for their storage allocation.
Secure enterprise (Okta) and consumer (Apple) logins.
May 2024
Mainnet app logins started with Firebase phone-based authentications. Adding Okta helps broaden our offering to enterprise customers, and Apple integration enables a secure email login option for consumers and SMBs.
S3 Storage.
June 2024
Introduced an S3 platform with a robust data protection service, offering enterprises an enhanced backup and recovery solution featuring:
Granular replication of object.
Zero RTO/RPO for Disaster Recovery with an Active and Archive replication setup.
List and Purge by date.
Encryption and Compression.
Kafka and Upload workers for optimization.
July 2024
Kafka is used to streamline events processing and queries. Upload workers is used to increase the speed of upload for browsers on Vult, Blimp and Chalk.
Enterprise and Vault protocols for scalability.
August 2024
Introduced an enterprise-mode protocol delivering unmatched scalability and performance: unlimited files, unlimited file sizes, over 5,000 objects per second burst performance, and sub-100ms performance with a billion files. Additionally, launched the Split-Key protocol for secure collaboration with advanced permission settings.