Say hello to Iron Drive

We are a web3 studio called 0x3 Studio and we just finished building a POC for a decentralized Dropbox. In other words: it’s a place where you can safely store your files that is not controlled by a single entity. The nice bonus: you pay only once for your files to be stored forever. No more endless recurring fees. We think this is one of the first applications that present a really interesting and useful use case of web3. We call it Iron Drive.

➡️ https://irondrive.xyz

How did we do it?

At the center of the solution lies Arweave, a blockchain platform that provides permanent and decentralized data storage. Arweave is tailored to offer efficient and affordable storage for large files, which is not possible with a general-purpose platform like Ethereum that is not optimized for this purpose. The high fees and slow transaction times of Ethereum would make it inefficient and costly for storing large files.

Although Arweave offers permanent and decentralized data storage, its limitation is that users need an Arweave account and AR cryptocurrency to upload files to the platform. This is a problem because, even though we think Arweave is the future, it’s still niche and it limits the number of possible users of the platform. In contrast, Ethereum has a much larger user base, with millions of users, making it more accessible and widely used.

We've come up with a way to combine the benefits of both platforms, thanks to an external solution called Bundlr. Bundlr allows users to upload files to Arweave using their Ethereum account, creating a seamless connection between the two platforms.

We have used not only Bundlr, but also Warp, a tool that enables the deployment of smart contracts on Arweave. To use Iron Drive, users are required to deploy their own smart contract via Warp, which only takes a few seconds. Upon completion of this process, the user gains exclusive access to their smart contract for the entirety of its existence.

On our side, we just provide the frontend, which allows files to be uploaded via Bundlr, and then added to the user's smart contract via Warp. Everything else is decentralized. And since the client we provide is open source, anyone can decide to deploy it wherever they want, which makes it possible to be completely independent of us, 0x3 Studio.

How is it better than Dropbox?

It's decentralized

If Dropbox goes out of business tomorrow, or the Dropbox CEO decides he doesn’t like you and bans you, you will lose all of your files. With Iron Drive, you’re in control as you have your own smart contract hosted on a blockchain, and you really own all of your files, as they’re attached to your Ethereum account (the same way your cryptocurrencies and your NFTs are). We’ll never be able to ban you, and if 0x3 Studio goes out of business, the contract will always be there, you can use it forever. You just need a frontend to interact with it (see next bullet point).

It’s open source

The backend is the blockchain. As soon as Ethereum and Arweave still exist, your data is safe. What we provide is just the frontend to upload files and interact with your smart contract. And we decided to make this client open source (here: https://github.com/0x3studio/iron-drive-webapp) so you can deploy it wherever you want (it's deployable on Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages in minutes). But we do know that not everyone is capable (or wants) to deploy a web application on a server, so we provide our own instance located at https://irondrive.xyz. To be able to use our instance, we just ask you to buy one of our JellyBots, and that’s it (that's our business model). When it's done, you'll have access to Iron Drive for life. And your JellyBot will also give you access to all the other applications built by 0x3 Studio, forever. A JellyBot is currently at ~0.03 ETH (~$50) so... you know what to do → https://jellybots.rocks 😇

It’s cheap

As we said, we only run the frontend, the backend being the blockchain, and running a frontend is very cheap. That’s why we can afford to ask you to only pay once (via the JellyBot) to have access for life, whereas Dropbox will charge you monthly or yearly fees because they have to run all the infrastructure to host your files, and that comes at a recurring cost. But—because there’s always a but—once you have your JellyBot and are inside Iron Drive, you’ll have to pay (in ETH or MATIC) every time you want to upload a file. This is normal because that’s how blockchains work. When you write on the blockchain, you have to pay. Don’t worry though, it’s cheap. The price to store data on Arweave is dynamic but tends to fluctuate within a narrow range of $1.50 to $4.00 per GB. This is something you pay only once and it guarantees your file will be hosted for a minimum period of 200 years. We think it's a fairer model than SaaS: you only pay when you use it.

What’s next for users?

Apart from UX improvements here and there to consolidate the current state of the application, here are the features we are currently evaluating.

Encryption

At the moment, all the files uploaded to Iron Drive are public, so you shouldn’t use this application for sensitive stuff. The next important step would be to be able to encrypt the files uploaded to Arweave, in a way that only the owner can decrypt them. We think of using https://litprotocol.com to accomplish that task.

Sharing

What’s interesting with tools like Dropbox is the fact that you can privately share specific files or folders with other people, for collaboration. It’s not possible in Iron Drive yet, but it’s one of the next things we’ll be working on next.

Notifications

At some point, it will be interesting to be able to get in touch with our users, for transactional or marketing purposes. We don’t ask for any email or phone number from our users at the moment (we only have the Ethereum address) so we might have to implement a system like https://push.org to enable that.

Other EVM chains

At the moment, Iron Drive only works with Ethereum and Polygon but we’ll extend to other EVM chains at some point, so you’ll be able to pay in other cryptocurrencies to upload files to Arweave.

And for developers?

API

We are building a very simple API where you input your Ethereum address or your Warp smart contract address and it will list all the files you uploaded via Iron Drive. The idea here is for developers to be able to use files uploaded via Iron Drive in their own applications. The source code of this API will also be open-sourced.

Developer docs

Everything described above, including the way to interact directly with the smart contracts on Warp, and to deploy the web application and the API on separate servers, will be explained in detail in the documentation for developers.