Cloud Outages:
A series of major outages at AWS, Microsoft, and Cloudflare reminded everyone that single-provider dependency is a real operational risk. More organizations responded by investing in hybrid and multi-cloud strategies—not just for cost, but to ensure resilience and business continuity.
Regulation and Sovereign Clouds:
The regulatory environment kept evolving. The EU AI Act, stronger data protection rules, the concept of geopatriation (keeping data and workloads within specific jurisdictions), and the continued reach of the U.S. Cloud Act and Patriot Act have led to more demand for sovereign cloud solutions. European and multinational companies are choosing infrastructure where data, keys, and policies stay under their own control, with local audit and governance.
AI Adoption and Storage Requirements:
AI and agent-driven workloads are growing fast. With that comes a need for new storage layers—ones that can support auditability, enforce programmable access and policies, and handle payment and monetization models like x402.
AI safety and compliance are now top priorities, and teams want storage that’s ready for these requirements from day one.
Akave’s approach is built for these realities:
S3-compatible, blockchain-native storage that’s verifiable, programmable, and designed for sovereign, hybrid, and AI-driven use cases.
Why Akave Cloud?
Akave was built for a world where single-vendor dependency is a business risk, not a strategy. The outages of 2025 made the headlines, but the real impact was a shift in priorities across the industry.
Key drivers and differentiators this year:
- More organizations expect to run critical workloads in hybrid or sovereign configurations.
- There is increased scrutiny on vendor transparency, data governance, and operational portability.
- AI and data teams want storage layers that are not just compatible with today’s tools but ready for programmable monetization, on-chain audit, and composable policy.
- Akave offers S3 compatibility for easy migration, blockchain-based audit trails and policy enforcement, native support for multi-party governance, and customer-owned keys.
- We are ready for x402 data monetization, agentic AI workflows, and cyberstorage demands—delivering cryptographic resilience, recovery, and separation of storage, keys, and policy by default.
Q1: Going Live in a Regulatory Crosswind
In the first quarter, Akave Cloud became generally available for our North America design partners, and our first production workloads went live. This period set the stage for a year focused on meeting real-world demands and new regulatory realities.
Key outcomes from Q1:
- The Akave O3 gateway on NVMe hardware gave early adopters the throughput and reliability needed for demanding AI and analytics use cases.
- The EU AI Act moved from talk to reality, setting a new bar for auditability, transparency, and technical governance. European customers began asking for sovereignty at every layer—storage, access, and key management.
- Early users pushed us to add more self-service features and streamline onboarding. We simplified the experience and improved support in direct response.
Q2: Compliance Pilots, Akave.Cloud Launch, Apache Iceberg, and Data Sovereignty Rises
By the end of Q2, Akave.Cloud was launched to the broader market, moving us from pilot projects to a truly production-ready platform. The quarter also brought our first compliance pilots and major community growth.
Highlights from Q2:
- The Model Context Protocol (MCP) completed its first real-world pilots. AI/ML teams and regulated customers used MCP to demonstrate auditable access to data and models.
- We delivered a production-grade integration with Apache Iceberg, enabling analytics teams to use Akave as a verifiable data lake backend.
- Akave supported over 100 builder and hackathon projects, including a major presence at ETHGlobal India. These projects helped stress-test our platform and highlighted improvements needed.
- Customers deployed petabytes of storage, mainly in North America, across both pilot and live workloads. This validated Akave’s architecture and reliability at scale.
- In Europe, regulatory developments like GDPR, Schrems II, and the AI Act made “sovereign cloud” a board-level requirement. AI workloads drove demand for true data and AI sovereignty, with more customers prioritizing control over data, keys, and policy enforcement.
Q3: Scaling Up and Meeting New Market Demands
Q3 was about turning momentum into real production adoption and evolving Akave’s architecture for broader use.
Key developments in Q3:
- Testnet registrations crossed 30,000—a mix of developers, enterprise proofs of concept, and ambitious side projects. The challenge became converting this interest into production deployments.
- Akave supported petabyte-scale, multi-tenant storage workloads in North America. European and LatAm teams heavily engaged on architecture reviews, especially around guarantees for key separation, policy enforcement, and multi-party governance.
- Akave’s architecture—featuring native separation of storage nodes, key management, and the O3 gateway—stood out to customers and partners. The ability to ensure no single party can unilaterally access or alter data enabled new conversations about zero-trust, sovereign deployment, and partner-governed cloud models.
Q4: Filecoin Onchain, The Rise of x402, and Cyberstorage
As 2025 closed, Akave doubled down on compliance, agentic AI, and hardened security, while executing on strategic integrations and partnerships.
Key outcomes from Q4:
- Akave launched Filecoin onchain integration, allowing customers to store both hot and archive data with independent, tamper-proof proofs—important for compliance and long-term data durability.
- The growth of agentic AI—autonomous agents, AI brokers, and machine-to-machine analytics—highlighted the need for storage layers that enable programmable payments, revenue sharing, and agent-to-agent commerce. Akave is ready for x402 natively, combining onchain audit, programmable access, and payment rails in a single platform.
- Cyber threats became more acute, with a rise in ransomware, insider risks, and multi-modal attacks. Customers began evaluating storage layers for cyberstorage features such as cryptographic auditability, air-gapped recovery, zero-trust access, and multi-party governance. Akave’s blockchain-native design, with separation of storage and keys and programmable policy, proved to be a robust answer as traditional clouds fell short.
By the Numbers (End of 2025)
This year, Akave saw strong engagement and growing adoption.
- 30,000+ testnet signups
- 100+ hackathon and builder projects (including ETHGlobal India)
- Petabytes of storage deployed in pilots and production (primarily US-based)
- Key integrations include S3 API/tools, Apache Iceberg, Filecoin onchain, and Akave O3 NVMe
What Customers and Partners Told Us
Our community and partners shared feedback that shaped Akave’s direction:
- “It’s not just about cost—cryptographically proven integrity and avoiding lock-in are the real differentiators.”
- “Verifiable, tamper-proof storage for LLMs is top of mind. Akave’s auditability stands out.”
- “Hybrid is the new normal. Customers want flexibility and are using Akave alongside AWS.”
- “Audit trails that go beyond logs—third-party verification—matters for compliance.”
- “Teams want to store data now and choose their compute later. AI, sovereignty, and composability are driving every decision.”
What We’re Still Improving
We remain focused on key growth and usability areas:
- Expanding production deployments beyond North America to support European demand for sovereign cloud.
- Making admin dashboards, compliance automation, and onboarding even easier for complex, multi-party environments.
- Closing the gap between testnet traction and production adoption, especially for regulated and agentic AI workloads.
2026 Priorities
Next year, we’ll build on our foundation and address new opportunities:
- Deliver x402 programmable monetization in production with AI and data partners.
- Support sovereign, multi-party deployments in Europe and beyond, maintaining strict separation of storage, keys, and policy.
- Continue to raise the bar on cyberstorage, with a focus on cryptographic integrity, zero-trust, and air-gapped recovery.
- Double down on supporting AI and agentic workflows, where storage, payment, and policy are all programmable and provable.
Reflections
2025 proved that the world is moving past black-box storage. If a platform can’t prove control, survive modern threats, or enable agentic AI and programmable monetization, it’s not keeping up. Akave’s vision—sovereign, programmable, cryptographically verifiable storage—is no longer radical. It’s quickly becoming the baseline for teams that take compliance, security, and innovation seriously.
We have more to do, but the future is onchain, programmable, and sovereign.
- Stefaan Vervaet, CEO & Founder, Akave Cloud