SN 75. Rank 20 of 32 by emission
Hippius
Hippius is a distributed cloud storage platform backed by Arion distributed storage and a custom Substrate blockchain.
In their own words · docs.hippius.comSN75 Hippius sells cloud file storage by the terabyte, like a self-storage company whose units sit in strangers' garages, with every file cut into pieces and spread across many of them.
The commodity, explained from zero
The product is disk space, rented by the terabyte per month. It is sold through an S3-compatible interface, meaning the same commands and software libraries that talk to Amazon's storage service work here unchanged; the docs give copy-and-paste examples for the AWS command line, Python, JavaScript and rclone. On top of that sit a desktop app, a web console, a model registry and virtual machines in beta.
The price list is public: $6.00 per terabyte per month on pay-as-you-go, billed hourly, down to $4.65 per terabyte on a 100-terabyte enterprise plan, with downloads included. Customers pay in credits, one credit being one dollar, bought by card or with TAO. The site says it is "The reliable and preferred storage solutions for businesses" and offers migration pages for people leaving other providers. The materials give no customer names, no revenue and no dated usage figure; the Hipstats explorer that would show total storage renders empty without a browser.
Why it is on Bittensor at all
The front page states the difference as resilience: storage is "Powered by a decentralized network of hardware providers, not a single point of failure", and the why-hippius page says "Validators and miners face slashing for misbehavior", meaning they lose stake for downtime, poor performance or fraud. Here the self-storage comparison breaks. A storage company keeps your boxes in one unit; Hippius cuts each file into 30 pieces, 10 of data and 20 of redundancy, spreads them across different miners, and any 10 pieces rebuild the file, so no single garage holds anything readable or anything essential.
How the work gets done
Miners, the garage owners, run a storage node with at least 2 terabytes of space and a fixed public address, hold pieces of customer files and "continuously answer cryptographic challenges to prove they are storing the exact data they claim to hold". Validators, the inspectors, run those challenges, place new pieces, rebuild pieces lost when a miner goes offline, and score each miner 70% on bandwidth served and 30% on data stored, with diminishing returns so the first terabyte counts more than the hundredth. Scores are grouped into families, smoothed over time and recalculated every six hours, and the share of emission (the subnet's newly minted TAO) that goes to miners rather than the validator grows with how much data the network holds.
How you would know it works
The status page at status.hippius.com lists the S3 gateway, registry, RPC node, indexer and explorer, each marked operational with a dated last update (the S3 gateway on 2026-08-22), and no incidents. The S3 endpoint itself is live and anyone can open an account and upload.
What is missing
The weight formula lives in repository root files that the README never links. The repository's own miner setup still describes a testnet bootnode. The registration cost is not stated (about 1 TAO on chain on 2026-09-09). The chain contact hello@hippius.com was not found on any page fetched; support runs through Discord and a forum, and the discord identity field is empty. There is no service-level agreement and no stated response time.
Go deeper
Sources for this explainer
Metaphor: a self-storage company whose units are in strangers' garages. Every claim is drawn from the evidence set or the subnet's own materials; "(inferred)" marks a conclusion rather than a quote. Corrections.
How we scored it
Four audiences, four questions each, scored on what a first-time reader can find in five minutes. Method in the rubric.
- subnet_name
- Hippius
- github_repo
- github.com
- subnet_contact
- hello@hippius.com
- subnet_url
- hippius.com
- discord
- not set
- description
- Blockchain-backed cloud: storage, VMs, and apps with unmatched transparency, trust, and power.
- additional
- not set
Stakers and validators●●●●● 3.8
Should I allocate here? · rank 6 of 32 for this audience
Q1What it is●●●●● 5
Hippius is a distributed cloud storage platform backed by Arion distributed storage and a custom Substrate blockchain.
priced per GB per month one click from the front, chain description matches
Q2Who it is for●●●●● 3
Hippius Explorer
linked from the front page renders Total Storage and node counts empty to a fetcher, status page lists services with dates, no revenue or customer figure, revenue share coming soon
Q3How it resists gaming or fails●●●●● 3
bandwidth 70% and storage 30% with diminishing returns, family decay and a demand-dependent pool, incentives.md covers placement, why-hippius says slackers get slashed, files the README never links
Q4Identity and documentation●●●●● 4
identity 5 of 7 (discord and additional not set), github and url resolve, docs carry a Substrate and Staking page and the site an Alphanomics page, contact hello@hippius.com not seen on pages fetched
Miners●●●●● 3.5
Can I compete, and what wins? · rank 15 of 32 for this audience
Q1What it is●●●●● 4
A storage miner in the Hippius network is a node that provides distributed storage capacity.
stores erasure-coded shards and answers storage challenges, two clicks from the docs root, no schema
Q2Who it is for●●●●● 4
Miners must provide at least 2TB of storage and a static public IP
with CPU, RAM and SSD minimums, registration cost not stated (chain burn 1.0 TAO today), no competitiveness statement
Q3How it resists gaming or fails●●●●● 3
bandwidth 70% and storage 30% with diminishing returns, 80% family decay over the top 10 members, recalculated every 6 hours, slashing named on why-hippius, no single miner example, no immunity
Q4Identity and documentation●●●●● 3
docs Earn section has node, Arion setup and registration pages (not all fetched), the repo minner-setup.md still describes a testnet bootnode and placeholder chain spec, pushed 2026-09-09, no release
Buyers and enterprises●●●●● 4.5
Can I use this today? · rank 2 of 32 for this audience
Q1What it is●●●●● 5
S3-compatible API at s3.hippius.com. Store anything. Standard clients (boto3, AWS CLI, rclone) work without modification.
AWS CLI, boto3 and rclone examples, console at console.hippius.com
Q2Who it is for●●●●● 5
All services are billed per use with credits (1 credit = $1), minted on our blockchain for full visibility.
S3 from $6.00 per TB pay as you go to $4.65 per TB Enterprise, customer types on front
Q3How it resists gaming or fails●●●●● 4
status page listing s3, arion, registry, rpc and indexer as Operational with dated updates, community forum and Discord as support paths, no SLA and no response expectation
Q4Identity and documentation●●●●● 4
Swagger API reference at api.hippius.com plus the S3 operations list in llms.txt and a docs chain API page, subnet_contact hello@hippius.com not found on the pages fetched so the match is unconfirmed
Newcomers●●●●● 4.3
What is this and why does it matter? · rank 3 of 32 for this audience
Q1What it is●●●●● 5
Transparent and Decentralized Cloud Storage
headline with a one sentence paragraph on storage, VMs and apps backed by a blockchain, consistent with the chain description, docs intro says it plainer
Q2Who it is for●●●●● 4
Powered by a decentralized network of hardware providers, not a single point of failure.
plus Affordable and Fair, Storj alternative and migrate pages, Google Drive comparison only third-party
Q3How it resists gaming or fails●●●●● 3
status page shows services operational with dates, Hipstats explorer and the value counters render empty to a fetcher, no dated benchmark or output sample on the site
Q4Identity and documentation●●●●● 5
subnet_name Hippius matches the site, description is a human sentence, url resolves, Why Hippius page and docs Learn section serve as about and learn pages
How this score came to be. Verified means the scorer fetched the page and the words are on it; inferred means concluded from code, absence, or a third party. The link badge is a separate automated check made before publication.
Something wrong? Corrections of fact are applied as they arrive during the window; score disputes are batched at its close. How to file one · GitHub issue · email.