Crust Network is a decentralized storage network and cloud solution built on Polkadots Substrate framework. It provides an incentive layer for the IPFS protocol and utilizes blockchain technology to enhance security, privacy, performance, and ownership of data.

The mainnet launched on September 1, 2021, and currently holds a storage capacity of around 1,200 PetaBytes provided by more than 4,000 individual nodes.

Crust Network is already integrated with many blockchains and provides a fully decentralized storage layer for Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Solana, Near, Elrond, Heco, and others. In the future, Crust will implement its storage services for even more networks to provide storage solutions for every ecosystem.

Some of the biggest blockchain projects already use Crust Network to store their data or host their websites and dApps via Crusts infrastructure. These include Uniswap, AAVE, or Polkadot Apps.

In the future, Crust Network aims to provide even more services for the Web3 and Web2 landscape for projects and companies to utilize and build on. Crust's architecture also has the capability of supporting a decentralized computing layer and building a decentralized cloud ecosystem.

• Providing the technical infrastructure for the Metaverse
• Minting, storing, and exchanging NFTs in a fully decentralized manner
• Hosting websites, dApps, video streaming, and more
• Web 3.0 gaming and decentralized social media
• Personal cloud storage to access data from anywhere
• File sharing and streaming services

Crust ($CRU) is a utility token within the Crust ecosystem that serves various utilities. The most important utilities and functionalities of the CRU token are:

• Staking to maintain GPoS consensus
• Collateral for storage providers to offer storage services
• Used to cover transaction fees
• Purchase storage or other cloud services
• On-Chain governance mechanism

Yes, you can enjoy the benefits of our network in many ways. For example, you can upload files to a fully decentralized Web 3.0 cloud solution on crustfiles.io, where you can keep your data safe and always accessible. Just sign in with your Crypto wallet and enjoy storing your files in the easiest and most secure way possible.

For NFT lovers, artists, and collectors, we also offer a decentralized NFT market platform where users can mint, store, and display their NFTs on a 100% decentralized infrastructure. Feel free to try out our NFT dedicated application on switchswap.io.

Compared to traditional and centralized storage providers like AWS, Google, Azure, or Alibaba Cloud, Crust Network offers many advantages due to its decentralized infrastructure:

Availability: Crust eliminates the Single-Point-of-Failure dilemma and the risk of downtime by creating an average of 80 replicas distributed over individual nodes in the network. This ensures a high level of redundancy to keep data always available and accessible.

Security: Crust has high resistance against DNS hijack attempts or DDOS attacks. Additionally, all data is encrypted by the IPFS protocol and Crusts TEE mechanism. Not even node operators or any other centralized organization can access or tamper with user data.

Performance: Due to the many replicas on nodes worldwide, files can be retrieved without server-side bottlenecks. Data can be sourced and processed from multiple nodes simultaneously, resulting in improved performance.

Costs: Cloud storage costs on Crust Network are only 25-50% of the costs compared to traditional Web 2.0 products on a centralized infrastructure (Compared to AWS S3 Cloud Server).

Crust Network is a public and completely permissionless network that anyone can join at any time.

Thanks to our MPoW (Meaningful Proof of Work) mechanism, there is no need for expensive and energy-consuming GPUs or high-end CPUs. All you need is a reliable internet connection, a CPU with TEE functionality, and some free storage.