Former Docker Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ben Golub, who helped turn the company from a fledgling startup into a major force in the software development world, is taking his expertise to a new area: the blockchain ecosystem.

A decentralized storage startup called Storj Labs Inc. this morning named Golub (pictured) as its CEO. The company offers an open-source platform that uses blockchain technology to power a new approach to data management.

At a high level, Storj’s model focuses on tapping the excess storage space sitting unused in computers around the world. The company compensates users who rent out their spare capacity with tokens based on the popular Ethereum distributed ledger. A customer with data to store, in turn, can buy storage space starting for a penny and a half per gigabit per month plus five cents per gigabyte of bandwidth they use.

Yet what makes Storj stand out is not so much its business model, but rather the way it’s implemented. Every file a user uploads to the company’s platform is encrypted and gets broken up into numerous pieces called as shards that are then spread out across different machines. Storj claims that only the customer knows where the data is kept, which makes the system highly resistant to attack.

In his first blog post as CEO, Golub said the startup already stores about 60 petabytes of data for over 70,000 customers worldwide just a year after its launch. The executive will work to widen the platform’s adoption and boost revenue in his new role.

Storj is in a similar position to Docker was when Golub joined it in 2013. The company, which at that point had just 15 employees, was a small startup working to monetize the surging popularity of its open-source software container platform. Under Golub’s leadership, Docker picked up several hundred paying enterprise customers and raised more than $150 million in funding.

Photo: SiliconANGLE