Sia launched decentralized content network Skynet

Sia blockchain developer Nebulous launched their file sharing and content delivery network Skynet. It’s a blockchain-based peer-to-peer file storage system powered by Sia. The blockchain development studio announced the project on Wednesday and it’s available immediately. As a result Skynet is direct competition for Tron’s BTFS and Filecoin’s IPFS.

Sia already offers a file storage service, which is basically a private cloud storage on the blockchain. They’ve build Skynet for more public activities, like web hosting.

Uploading and interacting with Skynet isn’t the easiest yet. But anybody is allowed to use web portals and Sia’s command-line client to uploads files onto Skynet. For example https://siasky.net is operated by Nebulous, while https://vault.lightspeedhosting.com is under control of Lightspeed Hosting.

Anyone is free to create their own web portal. Nebulous posted a guide for developers on Github.

Future developments will make things easier. For example, someone already made a Skynet-powered version of Pastebin. I’ve uploaded my first message onto the not-yet-self-aware blockchain storage service: