Join the Codex Public Testnet: Help Defend Against Data Censorship

The Codex public testnet has officially launched and has been operational since October, marking an important milestone toward building a censorship-resistant, durable future of decentralized data.

Codex is a decentralized storage network and data durability engine (DDE) that aims to foster a robust digital economy and freer societies where key data storage infrastructure is resistant to censorship, hacks, and outages.

Anyone can download and run a node on the Codex testnet today, joining a community dedicated to creating a fairer, decentralized, and durable storage platform for the world’s data. Codex aims to offer an alternative to centralized cloud storage, giving organizations, people, and apps a reliable solution for persisting critical data that ensures it remains resistant to manipulation or corruption.

Why Decentralized Storage Matters

Data may be the most valuable resource in an increasingly digital world, but it is also vulnerable.

Massive amounts of data are generated by people and applications every day, and this information is secured by the practices of centralized storage providers; single points of failure with ultimate custody of your cloud-based photo gallery, medical records, social media footprint, and countless other data points.

Storing data with cloud providers and other centralized organizations is convenient, but it is not without risks. In 2021, cloud service provider Fastly experienced an outage caused by a bug in its infrastructure. What followed was one of the biggest global Internet outages in history, with major websites around the world failing to load as the centralized platform they were stored on was compromised.

Websites, including Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, and The New York Times, went offline globally, demonstrating the devastating consequences of relying on a centralized service provider to store data and serve millions of people.

With decentralized storage like Codex, data is spread across multiple nodes of independent peers on a distributed storage network, making it resilient to outages on any single node or region. This would have ensured continuous access to data, even when a given storage node experienced downtime.

Decentralized storage mitigates the risk of data loss or outages and offers an elegant solution to the pervasive problem of data leaks, where unsuspecting users’ personal data is accidentally exposed through the failure of centralized parties.

In 2017, Equifax, one of the largest credit reporting agencies in the United States, suffered a massive data breach that compromised its extensive records, exposing the personal and sensitive information of 148 million people. Names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, social security numbers, and driver’s license numbers were all compromised in this sophisticated and targeted hack.

As a honeypot with complete custody over troves of sensitive personal information, Equifax presented a prime target to hackers, embodying the problem inherent in entrusting valuable personal data with centralized organizations. Even if these centralized entities are competent and do not misuse or exploit the data they are entrusted with, they will also be at risk of being hacked or compromised by malicious actors.

This breach would not have been possible if this information had been stored on a decentralized storage network. Data would have been encrypted and distributed across multiple independent nodes according to the decentralized storage protocol. Even if one node were compromised, the attacker would not be able to access the entirety of the data set or bypass any encryption.

Decentralized storage, as offered by platforms like Codex, allows sensitive data to be stored in a way that is more resistant to censorship, hacks, and outages and which can persist beyond the guarantees of any single entity.

Building a Durable and Repairable Storage Network

The Codex storage network is designed with durability first in mind. It uses ZK-proof-based remote auditing, repair mechanisms, and data dispersal to efficiently facilitate data storage, validation, and persistence on the peer-to-peer network. Codex also leverages erasure coding for forward error correction, allowing it to store massive datasets larger than any single node on the network.

The premise of Codex is to deliver an easy-to-use decentralized storage platform that can scale to meet rising global demand. Initial performance on the network aims to reach levels akin to “BitTorrent with persistence,” which will allow important data to persist securely and with high durability on the distributed network.

Following the launch of its public testnet, Codex will continue to focus on developing its decentralized file-sharing infrastructure to achieve functionality similar to platforms like BitTorrent and IPFS. Codex will build on this foundation by delivering data archiving and decentralized file backup mechanisms. Features planned for this phase include the Codex Marketplace, lazy data repair, efficient bandwidth incentives, and appendable data.

Read the whitepaper and other documentation to understand Codex and its protocol design.

Get Started With the Codex Testnet

The first step in joining the Codex testnet is to visit the testnet starter page.

From here, getting a Codex node up and running takes just a few minutes! Read the quickstart guide in the Codex documentation to get started.

Alternatively, you can head to the Codex Discord and visit the #join-testnet channel to start an interactive onboarding process that will guide you through each step of the setup process. Register as a testnet participant and review the hardware requirements before proceeding to #step-1 in the Codex Node Setup section of the Discord. Follow the step-by-step guide, and you should have your Codex testnet node set up and running in no time.

Codex core contributors look forward to helping you in the #node-help channel if you encounter any difficulties. Please do not hesitate to ask questions.

It is important to note that the Codex public testnet is an alpha version that is under active development. Encountering bugs is expected, and testnet participants should join the Codex Discord and provide feedback on any issues they encounter to aid the development of the protocol.

Play your part in the mission to defend data from censorship. Join the Codex Testnet.

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