Hippius

Hippius is a decentralized storage subnet running on Bittensor (Subnet 75), with its own native blockchain for verifiable data provenance. Its core products include: 1) Hippius S3, an S3-compatible object storage API supporting common operations like bucket management, multipart upload, presigned URLs, and lifecycle policies (but not yet versioning, cross-region replication, or S3 Select); 2) Hippius Drive, an end-to-end encrypted personal cloud drive with zero egress fees, where files are encrypted on-device before upload and only the user holds the keys; 3) agent-ready storage that lets AI agents read docs, use the S3 API, and store outputs on-chain for auditability.

The core differentiator is the Arion engine: files are split into 30 shards (10 data + 20 parity) using Reed-Solomon erasure coding, distributed across 459+ independent miners via the CRUSH algorithm. Any 10 of 30 shards can reconstruct the file, meaning the network tolerates up to 66% node failure simultaneously — far better than 3x replication (which fails at 2 node losses). Storage overhead is 300% vs. 500% for 5x replication. A cluster map published on-chain allows O(1) local computation of node locations, eliminating IPFS-style DHT lookups. Self-healing is automated: validators detect degraded shards, reconstruct them, and re-upload to healthy nodes. Grid Streaming opens concurrent QUIC streams to multiple miners for parallel download.

Market pain points addressed: AWS S3's single point of control — outages, price hikes, account suspensions, regional restrictions, and vendor lock-in. Hippius offers censorship-resistant, verifiable storage with no egress fees, where every storage operation is logged on-chain.

Development in the past six months (2026-03-13 to 2026-09-13): The Hippius Bridge went live on mainnet, routing unused miner emission onto the Hippius chain as Phase One of the alphanomics roadmap — all steps on-chain and publicly verifiable. Hippius Drive officially launched as a consumer product. The S3 API expanded to cover most common operations. Known limitations: no bucket versioning, no cross-region replication, no S3 Select, and a rate limit of 100 requests per minute per account.