How Cove differs from the alternatives

After we announced our impending token sale, many people responded by asking us what the difference is between Cove and similar products in the market. This is totally understandable as it helps the community place us as a product. I tried to respond to these queries in a previous blog post which spoke about our offering in more detail and didn’t mention any of the similar products out there, showing them the respect they deserve. But some of the community are still asking questions so we’re going to attempt to do a more direct comparison. We are not saying we are better, that’s up to the market to decide, we are just trying to explain where we are different to similar product.

The simplest way to define Cove’s positioning in the market is that we are the first company (that we know of) to combine zero-knowledge cloud storage with self-sovereign identity to give users full control of their online identity.

|Cove combines zero-knowledge cloud storage with self-sovereign identity to give users full control of their online identity

Cove follows 4 key processes to achieve this: effortless digitization, unbeatable encrypted storage (ensuring full privacy), safe sharing and aggregated validations. Some of these processes exist in the app right now, some are on the roadmap for development in the near future. Let’s compare these to similar products out there:

Secure Storage and Sharing

Dropbox
A file storage and syncing app that has created massive utility for people for larger files storage and sharing. Cloud storage is a really big space, Dropbox is a $10bn company despite being in the presence of Google Drive. We think there is a lot of potential in the fledgling zero-knowledge segment of this space.
So Dropbox are strong on storage and sharing but don’t offer full privacy, encrypted file storage, secure sharing or aggregated validations yet.

Google Drive

Super convenient to use as a cloud based hard drive, well integrated with Gmail and other Google apps and pretty much the standard for file sharing and storage
Privacy and zero-knowledge file storage are a major challenge for Google Drive, they will never be able to compete here as their business model relies on having access to your data.

Storj

The next generation of decentralised storage, Storj shreds encrypting files across peer storage devices. Its a brilliant and scalable concept that we admire and enjoyed a well-funded ICO.

While Storj is a great storage solution, they haven’t shown any signs of entering the validation space yet.

Authentication apps

Google and Facebook let you sign in to several websites without creating the logins there.
Of course the challenge here is that they are both hungry to monetise your data so they can see it all.

Civic

Civic is another great ICO-funded company that we have a lot of respect for. They raised the standards for running an ICO and have a really good product. Civic is a secure identity platform that helps individuals and companies protect against ID theft. The platform also allows users to login to several website without creating logins there. We expect to see some big developments from Civic as they expand their features and business partner network.
Civic is possibly the leader in identity management / self-sovereign identity and will be exploring decentralized storage options with IPFS in the future.
We respect all of the players mentioned above here and look forward to growing with them and learning from each other. A lot of the digitization and storage features we mentioned in the beginning are available on the Cove app so if you’d like to try it out, please download it from either the iOS or Android app stores.

Pre-registration is now open for our pre-sale. You can register on our token sale website.