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
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."
Related: 'Black Swan' author warns investors to brace for bankruptcies
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.
On Amazon's S3, you pay to store your data — and then you pay again, heavily, every time you pull it back out.
That second charge, called egress, is what turns a modest cloud bill into a big one.
Here is how the two stack up:
The company said management, community members, STORJ token holders, current investors and possible new investors could all share ownership of the reorganized company — an attempt to hand equity in the rebuilt business to the people who hold its token.
For context, any such arrangement must be approved by the bankruptcy court, and the company has not said how many holders would qualify or how ownership would be divided.
Crucially, Chapter 11 follows a strict order of priority — creditors are paid before owners. There is also a more immediate worry: payments owed to node operators before the filing are, for now, in limbo, caught up in the bankruptcy process along with everything else.
Storj is a survivor of crypto's first fundraising boom.
Over its life it raised roughly $35 million, the bulk of it in a May 2017 initial coin offering that brought in about $30 million — one of the marquee ICOs of that era. Earlier, it had sold an initial token, Storjcoin X, to raise about $460,000 in 2014, and picked up a $3 million seed round in early 2017 backed by individuals from firms including Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Techstars.
Nearly a decade later, that history is precisely the "earlier chapter" the company now says it is trying to close.
Storj is not going through this alone.
In October 2025, it was acquired by Inveniam, a financial-data and tokenization firm, which has continued to back the company and is supporting the restructuring. Storj said Inveniam "endorses this reorganization as the right path to a sustainable future," and that the company has been winding down previous acquisitions and non-core operations to refocus on its original storage business.
STORJ traded around $0.0736 as of the latest reading, roughly flat with its pre-filing level near $0.074 — meaning the bankruptcy itself did not trigger a fresh crash so much as cap a long, grinding decline.
The token is down about 61% from the roughly $0.187 it fetched when Inveniam announced the acquisition last October, and about 98% below its March 2021 peak of $3.81. A restructuring pitched as a "positive step" has done nothing to reverse that.
The filing also lands in a brutal stretch for the sector. In the same week, the veteran derivatives exchange BitMEX announced it was shutting down after 11 years, and another crypto firm filed for Chapter 11 after a token collapse.
Related: Bankruptcy scandals exposed centralized crypto risks, says Aly Madhavji
