Hippius
SN75Blockchain-backed cloud storage, virtual machines, and apps with transparent and trustworthy infrastructure
Hippius (SN75) is trying to be the Bittensor-native answer to AWS S3, decentralized cloud storage where files split into 30 encrypted shards across independent miners, billed in TAO instead of bandwidth fees.
// Decentralized cloud storage on TAO
Hippius is a decentralized storage and compute network. Users upload files through an S3-compatible API, and the network splits each file into encrypted shards that are distributed across miners running storage nodes.
The simple version: It is like Dropbox or AWS S3, but the files live across hundreds of independent operators rather than one company's data centers.
Centralized equivalent: AWS S3, Backblaze B2, or Cloudflare R2.
How it works:
- Miners run storage nodes that host user files in buckets, each assigned a unique IP, and earn rewards for storage capacity and bandwidth served
- Validators assign IP addresses to participants, track bucket sizes, verify storage requests and file ownership, and manage the credit and referral systems
- The problem it solves: Cloud storage is dominated by a handful of US providers that meter bandwidth aggressively, charge punitive egress fees, and reserve the right to deplatform accounts.
- The opportunity: Storage is one of the few decentralized use cases with a clean dollar comparison. If Hippius can match S3 on durability while undercutting it on egress, the value proposition is obvious to anyone running a backup target, a static asset host, or an AI workflow that needs persistent state.
- The Bittensor advantage: Incentivized storage networks have existed for years through Filecoin, Storj, and Sia, but Bittensor lets the network pay miners through TAO emissions rather than user fees alone, which can compress prices below what fee-only networks can sustain.
- Traction signals: Social posts in the past month cite roughly 100 TB of egress served and 162 active miners on chain. Recent academic R&D and healthcare-data pilots are mentioned by Hippius community channels, though specifics are not publicly verifiable.
Category: Storage and Data Availability | Centralized Competitor: AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2
The subnet has 162 active miners and a market cap of 103,775 TAO. Pool depth sits at 37,209 TAO with a root proportion of 0.17, suggesting the alpha price has had time to settle on organic flows. Current price is 0.02284 TAO per alpha. Over the last 90 days the price is up 8.9%, with a 3.1% pullback over the past 30 days.
Mechanism:
According to the TAO.app about page, miners operate storage nodes that host user files in buckets and earn rewards for the capacity and bandwidth they provide. Validators assign IP addresses to participants, track bucket sizes and user bandwidth, verify storage requests and file ownership, and run a credit-batch system that allocates rewards. The S3-compatible API surface lets existing tools point at Hippius with minimal code changes, and social posts describe a 30-shard sharding scheme with encrypted distribution across independent miners. Details below the API are not fully documented in the main repo README, so treat the shard count and durability properties as claims from the team rather than from inspected code.
The repository at thenervelab/thebrain is the active codebase: 245 total commits, 6 contributors visible on the live GitHub API, last commit on 2026-05-08, written in Rust. Recent commit messages reference a marketplace pallet, compute subscriptions, credit pallet refinements, and referral reward distribution, consistent with the network feature set described on the about page. Two of the past month's announcements in the Bittensor community covered Arion miner releases at versions 0.1.20 and 0.1.21, focused on P2P connectivity and historical synchronization.
A note on emissions: Hippius is currently at 0% emission share. Under Taoflow, this happens when net staking flows over the trailing window are slightly negative, and Hippius shows net flows of about -31 TAO over the past 7 days. Emission share can return as soon as net flows turn positive again. Separately, the subnet is configured with a 98.77% miner burn ratio, meaning when emissions do flow, almost all miner-side emissions are burned rather than paid to miners. That choice is the subnet owner's, and is most commonly used to recover registration cost or fund operational subsidies.
- Zero emission share: With net flows slightly negative over the trailing window, the subnet is currently receiving 0% of network emissions. This is a Taoflow consequence, not a permanent state, but it does mean miners are operating without protocol-level reward right now.
- High miner burn configuration: At 98.77%, almost all miner emissions are routed to burn rather than to miners. Combined with current 0% emission share, miner economics depend almost entirely on real user payments. Whether organic storage revenue is enough to sustain 162 miners long-term is an open question.
- Competition: Decentralized storage is a crowded category. Filecoin, Storj, Sia, and Arweave have multi-year head starts, deeper enterprise integrations, and in some cases lower retrieval latency. Hippius needs to win on price, censorship resistance, or developer experience rather than novelty.
- Concentration: Stake distribution shows a Gini coefficient of 0.68 with a Nakamoto coefficient of 17, in the middle of the pack for subnets of this size.
Into the next one.
