“Once we create a hash on that one block, we then check that hash against our existing database to see if that block already exists in our database,” he said. The blocks are encrypted on the client-side and Bitcasa creates a hash against the encrypted data. At no point in this process do we know what the actual file is,” Taptich said.Īccording to Taptich, on the client side, a user uploads a file let’s say it’s a HD copy of The Martian, which is then chopped into blocks. “The way that Bitcasa works, and this speaks specifically to the patent, is…on the client-side we’ll take this file and we’ll chop it into blocks. The patent covers the process through which data is encrypted with Bitcasa, which Taptich said is unique because it happens at the block level, not the file level.

The company spent 2014 redeveloping the platform and relaunched last year, announcing a licensing agreement with SanDisk for the development of a SanDisk-branded cloud storage solution.įast-forward to 2016 and Bitcasa has won a patent for its deduplication and smart caching techniques that help it deliver secure and efficient cloud storage. But the company learned a lot about the product, namely “that there was massive demand for it” and that it worked at a global scale, he said.Īt that time the company was also being approached by the developer universe – “two person dev shops all the way up to companies like Samsung and Huawei who were participating in this war for customer data ownership but didn’t have the arms to do that.” Many remember Bitcasa by its go-to-market strategy of $10 per month of infinite storage, which “was almost entirely suicidal,” Bitcasa CEO Brian Taptich said in an interview with Talkin’ Cloud.

Cloud storage company Bitcasa has come a long way since its former CEO Tony Gauda had to explain to skeptical judges at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2011 how it was able to encrypt data while being able to scale its storage efficiently.