Do you have a few free gigabytes on your PC or Mac at home? The idea behind Hive to compete with Dropbox – which he also wants to take the opposite – Google Drive or WeTransfer, starts from this observation: take advantage, with your agreement, of this unused space to store the data of others.
Files, small or very large, whose color you will never see, which will be divided into a multitude of small pieces to disseminate them throughout the world on thousands of computers including yours. And when its owner needs it, Hive will gather all these scraps to piece the files back together.
Reminds you of something? It’s normal. It was the technology behind Napster for sharing – and pirating – music. Hive, which has just announced a first fundraising of seven million euros, is based on a protocol derived from Bittorrent which is still used today for sharing files including films. – and not always legally –– but technologically, it’s solid and the principle is the same.
Concretely, this alternative cloud will work very simply. You can choose to participate by indicating the number of gigabytes or terabytes that you can make available to the network (Hivenet) as well as the hours when you don’t need your computer, typically at night. We will immediately obtain the equivalent in cloud storage on Hivenet – and so in others – for his own needs.
For example, if you make 50 gigabytes available, you will be entitled to another 50 gigabytes on Hivenet to back up your data or create a digital safe with your important documents. The other interest is that if you do not use all this space, you will obtain credits which, in the end, can be converted into euros. You will therefore be paid for the storage that you have made available to others.
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For the Franco-British founder of Hive, the main challenge will be to convince the general public to give access to part of their hard drive, and to establish a relationship of trust, including with companies.
To achieve this, David Gurlé, formerly of France Telecom and Microsoft, from Cannes at heart, claims to rely on the best in terms of encryption to protect data, and security to make his network invulnerable, including in the face of future quantum computers… which will remain to be proven.
David Gurlé is not just anyone: this pioneer of voice over IP – in other words from the telephone via the Internet – is the ex-founder of Symphony, created in 2014 and valued over a billion dollars, which earned him the title of “unicorn“.
“Up to 50% loss of the network, we manage to reconstitute the entirety of a file.”
David Gurlé, founder of Hiveat franceinfo
To seduce and gain support for his project, David Gurlé is playing on a popular argument: digital sovereignty. Those who sign up for Hive will have three options: to store their files everywhere without any particular preference, to store them only in certain countries – for example in France – or not to store them in certain countries, for example in China, in Russia or in Iran. In other words, everyone will have control over where their data is placed.
There remains one last technological obstacle to overcome: if all the computers on the network are switched off at the same time, how can you recover your files? Today, Hivenet supports up to 50% error thanks to file redundancies, in other words several same pieces stored in different places, but David Gurlé wants to go beyond 50%. And he suspects that this will be one of the conditions for the success of his next fundraising, at the end of 2023.
If all goes well, Hive will start in the test phase and in a small committee next October, before the official launch scheduled for early 2023. First objective: 100,000 users.