Akave Launches First Decentralized Data Layer on an Avalanche L1

Akave unlocks decentralized data at scale—verifiable, immutable, and programmable. Now live on Avalanche L1 for AI builders, businesses & trustless systems.
Stefaan Vervaet
July 9, 2025

The future doesn’t run on hope. It runs on architecture.

And the next frontier of that architecture is data; sovereign, programmable, and verifiable by default.

Today, we’re proud to unveil the first decentralized data layer built on an Avalanche L1. Akave, the world’s most programmable storage layer, goes live for builders, businesses, and AI systems that demand more than the status quo.

What is Akave?

Akave is not just storage. It’s a programmable, decentralized data layer, built for managing unstructured data in enterprise analytics, trustless apps, sovereign compute and agentic AI workloads.

  • It’s S3-compatible, easily plugs into web2 apps.
  • It’s verifiable onchain, down to every bucket, object, policy, and data action.
  • It’s immutable, with tamper-proof content-addressable hashes
  • It’s self-sovereign, only the users own the keys and define who has access.
  • It’s enterprise-grade, yet designed for the next wave of AI agentic apps.

Akave is the only enterprise-storage network where every action, data object, bucket, policy is cryptographically recorded and action is programmable

Introducing Akave Cloud

For teams ready to store data today, Akave Cloud delivers all the benefits of Akave’s decentralized architecture in a hosted, enterprise-grade environment.

Fully S3-compatible and backed by a high-performance Avalanche L1, Akave Cloud lets businesses onboard data with no infrastructure overhead, while still getting verifiable, encrypted, and sovereign data storage.

Key benefits include:

  • Up to 80% savings vs. traditional cloud
    Save up to 80% vs traditional cloud by eliminating egress fees, reducing data redundancy overhead, and gaining operational efficiency.
  • Portable immutability with no vendor lock-in
    Your data can move freely across regions and vendors, while it stays immutable and  secure.
  • Cryptographic audit trail
    Every action is recorded immutably. If something happens to your data, you can prove it, and trace who, when, and how.
  • Compatible with existing data pipelines
    S3 compatibility means Akave works out of the box with Snowflake, data lakes, analytics pipelines, and AI workflows — no refactor needed.
  • Onchain access enforcement
    Define access, retention, and monetization rules in smart contracts. Enforce SLAs, trigger payouts, and manage usage with onchain logic.
  • Self-sovereign by default
    Every object is encrypted client-side, governed by onchain policies, and immutable unless you say otherwise. You own your data, no exceptions.

Akave Cloud isn’t a hosted version of the old world. It’s a gateway into the programmable AI agentic future

Why Now? The Pressure Is Real

We are entering a new era where data is no longer stored and forgotten.

It’s queried constantly, trained into models, streamed into agents, and sold in real-time, across borders, apps, and marketplaces.

But legacy infrastructure wasn’t designed for this.

1. AI Is Driving Massive Data Demand

AI workloads have exploded, and the infrastructure behind them is buckling. IDC predicts data volumes will exceed 163 zettabytes by 2025, largely driven by AI querying vast, unstructured datasets at high frequency.

2. The Cloud Tax Is Getting Heavier

Gartner reports egress fees make up 10–15% of many companies’ cloud bills, a hidden cloud tax that punishes innovation. Every time you move data between regions, vendors, or pipelines, you’re paying for your own growth.

3. RansomAI Is Here — and Legacy Storage Can’t Stop It

AI isn’t just helping teams build. It’s helping attackers break.

Akave enables more resistance against advanced threats like RansomAI — generative, adaptive malware that evades rule-based defenses. With no plaintext access, no mutable data paths, and no centralized override, ransomware has nowhere to land, and nothing to lock.

The Case for Akave

Akave was designed for this moment — a storage layer for intelligent systems, programmable data flows, and a zero-trust world.

  • A programmable, onchain-verifiable data layer for AI applications
  • Zero egress surprise — control over what’s transferred and how
  • Tamper-resistant encryption and immutable provenance to outmaneuver next-generation ransomware

This isn’t a better version of the cloud.

It’s a sovereign, decentralized substrate for the internet’s most valuable asset: your data.

How Akave Works

The Akave network is designed for high performance, composability, and compliance. Here’s how data flows through the system:

  1. Upload & Ingress
    Users upload via SDKs, CLI, or S3 endpoint. Data is encrypted client-side before hitting the wire.
  2. Chunking & Encoding
    Encrypted data is split into blocks, erasure-coded for redundancy, and prepared for distributed placement.
  3. Distributed Storage via Avalanche Subnet
    Blocks are stored across decentralized vendors, orchestrated by an Akave subnet on Avalanche for performance and provenance.
  4. Access Control via Smart Contracts
    Policies for permissions, retention, monetization, and more are enforced entirely onchain with no central database required.

Geozoning and App-Specific Subnets

Akave’s architecture supports powerful deployment primitives:

  • Geozoning: For data localization or compliance (e.g., GDPR), Akave spins up regional subnets that operate independently but are still validated by Avalanche mainnet validators.
  • Application-Specific Subnets: DePIN, IoT, and high-throughput use cases eventually will be able to launch their own customizable Akave Avalanche L1s,  adjusting TPS, storage logic, and policy enforcement without impacting the rest of the network.

Already Powering Real-World Use Cases

Akave is in production with early adopters across AI, analytics, and media:

  • Heurist.ai – for decentralized AI training with onchain verifiability
  • TheDefiant.io – for censorship-resistant media archives
  • Intuizi – for Snowflake analytics with immutable audit logs

Learn More:

How to Engage

If you’re an enterprise

  • Migrate from cloud and free your data
  • Cut costs and regain compliance
  • Store data with proof, not promises

    Contact us

If you’re a builder

Modern Infra. Verifiable By Design

Whether you're scaling your AI infrastructure, handling sensitive records, or modernizing your cloud stack, Akave Cloud is ready to plug in. It feels familiar, but works fundamentally better.