Hippius rents out storage space on miners' disks, like Amazon S3 or Dropbox. It charges $6 per terabyte a month and nothing for downloads, which is why promoters call it "thousands of times cheaper than AWS." That is true only when the same files are downloaded many times. The product works and usage is growing fast. Paid demand is small and mostly from other Bittensor subnets; staking the token yields about 32% a year in alpha (11 Oct), all from emission.
| Provider | What downloads cost | Monthly bill |
|---|---|---|
| Hippius (pricing) | Included, no cap stated; the chain's bandwidth price is set to zero | $12 |
| Cloudflare R2 (pricing) | Free; storage $15/TB | $30 |
| Backblaze B2 (pricing) | Free up to 3× what is stored, then $10/TB | ~$954 |
| Amazon S3 (us-east-1) | $90/TB for the first 10 TB, then $85 and $70 (CloudZero summary) | ~$7,850 |
Downloads repeat in AI because every machine that runs a model first downloads its weights, again on each restart or update, and every training server pulls the dataset for each run. One Hippius user, the Minos subnet, sends a fresh genome dataset to all of its miners every 72 minutes. That is the workload where Hippius is cheapest.
| Who | What they do | How they are paid, per day | Customer money? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storage miners (281 operator groups paid in the latest round) | Hold pieces of customers' files on their own disks and serve them when a file is downloaded. Scored 70% on bytes served and 30% on bytes stored. | About $14,700 of new SN75 alpha. It is paid to one Hippius-run account, converted to the Hippius chain's token (hAlpha) and paid out to miners about every two hours | No |
| Validators and stakers (12 validators) | Stake behind the subnet's validators. Two validators take 82.5% of dividends: an outside one (42.3%) and the owner's own (40.2%). | About $14,700 of new alpha; stakers earn about 33% a year in alpha | No |
| The Nerve Lab, the company (its subnet-owner account) | Runs the Hippius chain, gateway, billing, Drive apps and sales. | About $6,500 of new alpha (the 18% owner cut), plus about $75 a day of customer credit purchases | Yes, the $75 |
| SN75 token holders, including hAlpha stakers | Hold the token, or bridge it to hAlpha and stake it on the Hippius chain. | hAlpha stakers share the dividends miners give up on locked collateral, which is emission. The team says prepaid credits will add to that pool; no customer payment has been shown to reach it. No buyback or burn is visible on chain | Not yet shown |
This is the closest public measure of usage. The figure counts every stored piece, and each file takes three times the disk of a single copy (30 pieces, any 10 of which rebuild it), so the customer data behind 899 TB is probably about 300 TB; that division is our inference. The dip in February 2026 is the switch to the current storage engine, Arion, which the co-founder said removed wasted space "at the expense of stats" (post, 21 Jul).
Buying credits ($1 each, prepaid) is the point where customer money reaches Hippius, so these bars are the closest thing to revenue. Team-issued credits are left out. Two months are shown in amber because one purchase dominates each: a single buyer's 10,664 credits on 12 Sep 2025 (96% of that month) and one 7,000-credit purchase on 19 May 2026.
Billing is when a credit is used up by storage or downloads, so this line is revenue earned rather than cash collected (the purchases chart above is cash in). The 30-day rate at the right edge ($31K a year) still includes the last days of the September peak; the headline figure leaves those days out. In the 8–15 Sep peak, $23,064 was billed against team-issued credits and $3,518 against credits the same two accounts had bought; the team says the peak was overbilling, later refunded.
Each file is cut into 30 pieces, each a tenth of its size, held by different miners; any 10 rebuild it, so 20 can be lost (docs). Together the pieces take three times the file's size on disk. No outage has been reported, and first-response times matched Amazon's from the same connection. Hippius offers no durability or uptime promise: its terms say users are responsible for their own backups. We found no published test under heavy download load, the job it is cheapest for.
Storage is a large market: Amazon S3 alone brings in an estimated $8.5–13.7B a year (our derivation from Omdia's AWS storage share; Amazon does not disclose it), Backblaze's storage line $113M, and Wasabi was valued at $1.8B in January. Filecoin, the largest decentralised network, is worth $965M; payments through its on-chain billing system ran at $59K a year in August (FilecoinTLDR, 4 Sep). Hippius is worth $19.1M (11 Oct). Size is not the problem; winning customers is. The closest decentralised rival, Storj, took eight years and about $35M to reach $13M a year in sales, and its company filed for bankruptcy protection in July 2026 (The Block). Hippius has issued about $23.7M of tokens in 19 months.
Almost all miner rewards go to one Hippius-run account, which converts them into Hippius's own chain token and pays storage operators every two hours. Operators have sent about half of it back and sold it. The owner account receives $6,500 a day and sold the equivalent of 65% in the 30 days to 11 Oct (taorevenue); 14.8% of the token supply is pledged to the owner, most of it by two outside accounts.
Hippius's token plan, Alphanomics, is meant to route value to holders who swap SN75 one-for-one for hAlpha and stake it on the Hippius chain (no minimum stated, 48 hours to unstake). Only the staking part is live, and it pays from emission.
| Part | How it is meant to work | Status |
|---|---|---|
| hAlpha staking | The SN75 Hippius holds for miners' pay stays staked on Bittensor; its yield goes to hAlpha stakers | Live. Paid from emission |
| Miner deposits | Miners lock hAlpha per storage node and give up its yield to stakers | None locked. Each operator's first node is free (cut from two on 9 Oct); every further node needs a refundable 50,000 hAlpha deposit (about $249K at $4.99), and no operator has ever paid one. All 600 operator places were taken again on 11 Oct, after falling to 531 when the free allowance was cut |
| Customer credits | Payments become locked hAlpha whose yield goes to stakers, released to referrers, affiliates and the treasury as storage is used | Not built. On chain a customer purchase only mints $1 credits in the buyer's account; nothing converts the payment into hAlpha, locks it, or buys SN75 |
| Engram | Unused emission moves into a permanent lock no one can withdraw (announcement, 4 Aug) | Not in the code |
| Buyback | The co-founder says a public buyback wallet exists | No address published. No burn is planned; the page says the plan "avoids burns" |