Aleph.im brings decentralised cloud services to Avalanche

Possible use cases of the technology include messaging dApps, censorship resistant web apps and fully decentralised NFTs

Avalanche announced on Friday that it is integrating with open-source cross-chain project Aleph.im. The move will bring decentralised cloud services to developers building on Avalanche.

Aleph.im provides a decentralised identification framework, as well as decentralised databases and computation, to help apps and protocols realise a fully decentralised architecture by cutting out the centralised parts of their stack.

Aleph.im technology decentralises cloud services, thereby providing an alternative to centralised cloud services which regularly suffer outages. With Aleph.im, anyone can participate in the network by becoming a consumer or provider of file storage and computing power, with their mutual benefits being compounded.

The project sounds somewhat similar in mission statement to Filecoin, but unlike Filecoin, Aleph.im is a scalability network, not a blockchain. The use cases also differ for each. Filecoin is useful for storing large files like videos, images, sounds and pdfs, whereas Aleph.im is focused on supercharging the decentralised finance (DeFi) ecosystem by allowing its dApps to migrate their centralised parts.

Aleph.im CEO, Jonathan Schemoul, commented, “I am excited to now support Avalanche and all the projects built on its revolutionary blockchain infrastructure, bringing our unstoppable cloud services to all the teams building the new generation of fully decentralized web3 products.”

The integration means that Aleph.im technology can be leveraged by any dApp or protocol being built on Avalanche. This has many potential uses, such as DeFi products, messaging dApps, unstoppable social networks, real-time dApps, tamper-proof document certification systems, censorship resistant web apps and fully decentralised NFTs, which currently tend to be partly centralised.

The technology will include a forget function, to be added later this year, which will mean it meets GDPR compliance. Users already have full control and ownership of their data as it is encrypted by default. Projects currently using the Aleph.im network include Aleph Blogs, a decentralised blogging app, and MyAleph, an app similar to Dropbox.

The Avalanche ecosystem has been growing rapidly since its mainnet launch in September 2020 and already includes projects such as Chainlink, Polyient Games and TrustToken. Last week also saw the announcement that Union Finance would be bringing insurance coverage to Avalanche, while Founder and CEO of Avalanche, Emin Gün Sirer, was voted one of the top 10 most influential people in crypto in 2020 in a poll on CoinMarketCap.

The Aleph.im and Avalanche integration is expected to be completed this week on 4 February.