File storage has long been known as a centralized solution. Storj seeks to change this with their decentralized file storage and retrieval architecture. We'll go over their design, engineering goals, and challenges. We dive deep into how erasure codes can be used to mitigate replication requirements, how trust is managed on their decentralized platform, and how one can be incentivized to donate their storage space and bandwidth to the world through their network.

**Links** https://storj.io/ https://github.com/Storj/

Plasma is one of the strongest candidates for Layer 2 scaling solutions. Since the Plasma whitepaper was released in August 2017, there's been a multitude of Plasma implementations experimenting with the idea. On this episode we feature Georgios Kosntantoploulos, Lead Researcher at Loom Network, to talk about Plasma, the different variations, and the future of scaling through Layer 2 solutions.

https://github.com/loomnetwork/plasma-paperhttps://www.gakonst.com/

Grid+ is one of the most legitimate and exciting products utilizing blockchain in the space, so we're very excited to present Alex Miller (CTO) and Karl Kreder (VP Hardware) on our program. We discuss their line of blockchain appliances, how they're built, their design philosophies, and the challenges in building hardware for blockchains. We get to hear some of their thoughts on the future of blockchain and consensus protocols, and where they see the world moving into the future as decentralization becomes and adopted norm.

This episode features Michael O'Rourke (CEO) and Luis C. de Leon (CTO) of Pocket. Pocket is a chain-agnostic decentralized AWS for blockchain full nodes. In a world where full nodes become more expensive to run, Pokt aims to have people host their nodes in their network by registering it with their Proof of Stake blockchain. Using Pokt tokens, someone can rent usage of the full node, using the node's stake as a guarantee of availability, removing the concern of maintaining one's own hardware (virtual or otherwise) to create a decentralized application.