Roadmap

Arkel is in active, early development. The main instance of the network is scheduled to go live soon.

Now: A working core network

• Erasure-coded (k/m) object storage with client-side encryption
• Raft-based index cluster (membership, quotas, ownership)
• Storage nodes: registration/heartbeat, GC of unreferenced shards
• Integrity: health checks, shard audits, automatic repair & redistribution

Next: An economy for contributors

• Credits & quotas — accounts buy credit to store; usage debits against it
• Contribution grants — storage operators earn credit for the bytes they host
• Payouts — settle node operators in USDC
• Operator dashboard — see your capacity, usage, and earnings

Then: Drop-in compatibility

• S3-compatible gateway — use Arkel from existing tools (rclone, restic, the AWS SDK) instead of only the arkel CLI
• Replication/import tooling to migrate off a cloud provider

Later: More good stuff

• Public node discovery & reputation (who is fast, reliable, well-connected)
• Node-vetted payout scaling and market-based pricing

This is a rough order, the roadmap will be largely driven by what contributors actually need.