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What is Codex? ​

Codex is a decentralised data storage protocol. Its primary features are strong censorship resistance and durability guarantees. It has a reference implementation by the same name, written in nim. It serves as the storage layer of the Logos tech stack. Alongside the trustless agreement layer, Nomos, and the communications layer, Waku, it is one of the Logos Collective's foundational projects.


Motive ​

The remote storage landscape is dominated by an increasingly small number of internet powerhouses—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. While these services score highly in terms of user experience and convenience, centralised cloud data storage suffers from the following drawbacks:

  • Censorship

  • Lack of data ownership

  • Breaches and outages

  • High cost

Centralised cloud storage providers have an established history of censoring data and, as de facto owners of said data, have the power to do so according to their own standards. Furthermore, centralised platforms have fallen victim to major data breaches and service outages on numerous occasions.

Such incidents have created a gap in the market for a decentralised, censorship-resistant alternative. Existing peer-to-peer storage and file-sharing networks address some of these issues—such as robustness in the face of network disruptions, and desirable resistance to censorship. Yet without adequate incentives and strong data durability guarantees, they make for unsuitable foundations upon which to build truly unstoppable applications.

Existing decentralised storage solutions purport to improve upon early P2P file-sharing platforms like eDonkey and Gnutella. However, the market still lacks a decentralised storage solution that is efficient in terms of storage and bandwidth usage, while offering performance and durability guarantees comparable to incumbents.


Decentralising data storage ​

Codex began in 2021 to address a need for a durable, decentralised storage layer for the web3 tech stack.

The name "Codex" refers to an ancient form of book—an allusion to the data storage engine's extremely robust—99.99%—durability guarantees.

Codex was announced as a core Logos Collective protocol in June 2023.

Testnet ​

Codex is currently in the testnet phase. The client implementation is free and open software. If you're interested, we encourage you to try Codex, connect to the testnet and experiment with its features. Get started here