Nebulous to continue Sia storage service after fine by SEC

Decentralized data storage company Nebulous will continue its Sia platform after it settled with the SEC. The company behind the Sia platform has to pay disgorgement, a prejudgment interest and a civil money penalty for a total of $224.602 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That's almost double of the $120.000 they raised with their unregistered token sale back in 2014.

Sia announced the settlement with the SEC on Tuesday. As part of the settlement Nebulous is not required to register the Sia utility token as a security with the SEC.

They did not admit guilt. Consumers and companies can use Siacoins on the Sia platform to buy and sell cloud storage space. Sia also sold Sianotes, which gives investors a share of the revenue over the network.

Earlier this week blockchain startup Block.One announced their settlement with the SEC. They had to pay $24 million, but managed to raise over $4.1 billion from the summer of 2017 till to summer of 2018.

Earning by mining and hosting files

Consumers and companies can't only earn Sia by sharing storage space with the network, but also by mining. But this is not something Nebulous really favors. The company even forked its network last year to shut out major mining companies like Bitmain. Instead the company launched its own mining hardware, optimized for mining Sia.

Currently the Sia network has 323 hosts spread out over 43 different countries. These hosts store over 500 terrabytes of data all over the world. Only the person with ownership over certain files is able to access them.

Nebulous isn't the only company offering this type of service. Filecoin, MaidSafe, TardiGrade (formerly known as Storj), BitTorrent's BTFS and many others are active in this field. It's hard to say which project is the most popular or is the best, as all are still in active development. Additionally you could say that multiple service providers are a good thing for the market. TardiGrade has the biggest community behind its project, while BitTorrent of course has a major name.

MaidSafe is the 64th biggest crypto project in terms of market cap. Their project is worth 70.3 million dollars. Storj, the coin associated with TardiGrade, only has a market cap of 17 million dollars. With 68 million dollars Sia is doing a lot better, while BitTorrent is the biggest one in this list with a market cap of over $90 million.