Crust Network has disclosed more details about its Crust Storage Market, a decentralized marketplace for trading storage resources within the Polkadot ecosystem. The design aims to connect storage providers and users in an open market environment. To help bootstrap activity, the project said CSM tokens are being distributed to community members through UniSwap liquidity programs and other ecosystem campaigns. Looking ahead, Crust said additional services such as decentralized cloud computing may also be traded through the broader Crust Service Market.
Testnet progress before parachain launch
As part of its preparation for a mainnet rollout via a Polkadot parachain, Crust has launched the CC2 Maxwell testnet along with the incentivized “Profit Ark I & II” programs. “Profit Ark I” began on November 30 and was scheduled to run for 50 days. The team said a total of 320,000 CRU, worth about $1.4 million at the time, would be distributed to participants. At the time of publication, more than 740 nodes across multiple regions had contributed roughly 40 PB of storage capacity.
According to Polkadot telemetry data cited in the release, the number of Crust Maxwell CC2 nodes had already surpassed those of Polkadot and Kusama, with storage nodes spread across Europe, Asia, and North America. For “Profit Ark II,” the team said it planned to test the network’s full feature set, including staking, guaranteed nodes, and related functions.
Funding and parachain auction strategy
Crust also highlighted its financial and ecosystem backing. In September 2020, the project completed a multi-million-dollar Series A round with participation from NGC Ventures, SNZ, HashCIB, DFG, KNS Group, and AU21 Capital. During 2020, it also joined the Substrate Builders Program and received a grant from the Web3 Foundation. Together, those milestones point to both capital support and technical alignment within the broader Polkadot stack.
On parachain auctions, the team referenced remarks from the first Polkadot Decoded event on December 3, saying parachain slot functionality could go live in February 2021. Crust said it would then publish a more detailed roadmap covering its plans to participate in both Kusama and Polkadot auctions. CEO Bova Chen added that, based on the project’s whitepaper, around 40% of the ecological development budget had been allocated to slot auctions and related expenses.
Building decentralized cloud infrastructure for Web3
Crust describes itself as a decentralized storage network for the Web3 ecosystem. It supports multiple storage-layer protocols including IPFS and exposes storage interfaces to the application layer. The project also said its technical stack could support a decentralized computing layer, reflecting a broader ambition to build a decentralized cloud ecosystem centered on data privacy and ownership. As the original material is a press release, readers should independently evaluate the claims and roadmap against subsequent project execution.