Storj Labs, one of the earliest companies to try building cloud storage on a blockchain, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the latest crypto business to buckle in a punishing week for the industry.
The company filed on July 26 in the U.S
Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of West Virginia (Case No. 5:26-bk-00512), framing the move not as a collapse but as a cleanup. Storj said it filed to resolve “certain legacy obligations” while keeping its business running, and that it expects no interruption to customer service during the process. “This is a decisive, positive step,” said Kaloyan Raev, Storj’s director of software engineering. “The business underneath is strong and right-sized. What holds it back are legacy obligations from an earlier chapter.
This process lets us resolve them in an orderly way and come out the other side with a clean foundation.” What Storj actually does Storj is a decentralized cloud storage provider — a would-be competitor to services like Amazon S3, but built on a peer-to-peer network rather than company-owned data centers. Files are encrypted, split into pieces, and distributed across thousands of independent “storage nodes” run by people around the world who contribute spare hard-drive space and get paid in the company’s STORJ token. Founded in 2014, it was one of the original attempts to turn blockchain incentives into a real cloud-infrastructure business.