[arpitagarwal]

Thanks for the great questions!

Reliability, performance, and a scalable infrastructure were strong selling points of Storj for us, and hence, we decided to go with them to provide a more seamless experience in terms of data upload and fetch. We also use Filecoin for immutability of user data, and as another layer of global redundancy.

Currently, we pay for storage/egress to Storj. Users can pay using dollars/crypto on our platform and we convert it to relevant Storj tokens to pay for storage. It is not automated yet, but yes we plan to automate it soon. Also, Storj does accept Storj tokens as payments.

About interchangeability, we plan to provide the migration functionality on our end to users.

We started with Firebase/Google because it was easy to setup. However, our team has been experimenting with different blockchains to sync the different file-ids and file-hashes. This would provide even more dApp developers to develop apps on top of Slik. We have a potential fit, and expect that to be integrated in H1'2022.

[beedrillzzzzz]

Thanks for the reply.

As many other comments suggest, I think it would be great to provide clear documentation to users that they can:

1. Run the entire app themselves, with their own chain/storage nodes etc - its the only way to really guarantee/prove the software is decentralized.

2. Access your data from both any centralized providers (such as yourself) or a local instance, ideally its so transparent you can literally select a different gateway in the app and keep working all within 5 seconds.

This is the bare minimum I would personally require before adopting a "decentralized" software tool.

Looks like you all are taking an incremental approach and not quite there, its a tough problem to solve but I wish you luck!