Hippius (SN75) Has Been Crushing It. Here’s What We Know

Let me start with a number that should make you sit up: 25 terabytes added and 160 million new files in just 23 days. That’s the kind of growth chart founders dream about, and it’s happening right now on Bittensor’s Subnet 75.

But here’s the part that really hits. This month, Hippius served 100 TB of egress traffic for free. If you’d run that same workload on AWS S3, the bandwidth bill alone would have cost you roughly $8,000. You would spend that amount just for the privilege of downloading your own data.

FYI, egress refers to the movement of data out of a storage provider.

I think this is why people should start paying attention. Let’s walk through it.

And before anyone says these are just claims, here’s proof straight from hipstats.com:

Used storage has roughly doubled in 30 days, from ~67 TB to ~140 TB. Files on the network have gone from ~390M to nearly 800M in the same window. That’s an exponential growth curve that is getting steeper.

What’s Hippius BTW?

Hippius is doing the thing every decentralized storage project has promised for years but rarely delivered: combining AWS-grade usability with truly decentralized economics. You pay roughly $3 per terabyte per month, and you never pay for egress. Ever.

For context: depending on your volume and provider, that’s 30x to 2,000x cheaper than AWS, Google Cloud, or Dropbox.

And it’s not larp. You can verify everything on hipstats.com. Per-node storage, file counts, on-chain proofs, miner responsibilities; all there. And we’ll talk about most of that below.

Speaking of nodes, here’s where the network lives right now:

Real infrastructure on three continents (Europe, North America, and Asia) with the bulk currently anchored in Europe. Zoom out to the 30-day node growth picture and you can see the network steadily holding above 100 active nodes:

Europe leads by a wide margin (~103 nodes), with North America and Asia rounding out the footprint. Three continents, dozens of independent operators; that’s what decentralization looks like. Compare that to Dropbox, which stores user data primarily across co-location data centers in the United States. One country versus three continents.

Hippius isn’t just claiming to be decentralized; data proves it.

The Money Story

Here’s where the flywheel gets interesting.

Hippius runs its own Substrate blockchain, and its token, hAlpha, is 1:1 convertible to Bittensor’s SN75 alpha. Revenue from storage credits gets locked. A chunk of that goes to burns and buybacks:

• SN75 alpha token on Taostats: 536.32K alpha tokens burned
• Over 11% of hAlpha supply has already been burned, worth more than $5 million
• The Hippius team is actively buying back on-chain. Here are the on-chain records of the buyback wallet
• Up to $50,000 storage revenue from community adoption was reported in October 2025; that number would have gone up by now

And this is the part that separates Hippius from the dozens of storage projects that launched with a great marketing story and zero PnL. There’s actual revenue. There’s actual value accrual. Token holders aren’t just hoping; they’re watching supply shrink.

Want a real-time proof that revenue is climbing? Look at this:

Accounts are growing steadily, but the Credits Purchased chart on the right is the one to lock in on. After weeks of slow accumulation around 47K, it ripped to ~55K in a matter of days, a sharp step-up in actual paying demand.

Credits imply real customers spending real money on storage. That’s the input feeding the burn-and-buyback engine.

Arion: The Engine that Powers Everything

Early on, the team looked at IPFS and decided it wasn’t production-ready for what they needed. So they built their own backend from scratch and called it Arion. These are how this upgrade shapes up in real life:

• Same files now use ~40% less space
• Way safer (survives 2/3 nodes down!)
• Auto-repairs plus super-fast downloads

Why This Matters for AI

This is the strategic piece a lot of people miss. Hippius isn’t just “cheap storage with a token attached” — it’s purpose-built for the AI era.

Modern AI is a storage-heavy discipline. You’d talk about model weights, training datasets, inference logs, RAG corpuses, fine-tuning checkpoints, and the list goes on. If you’re an AI team burning compute on Bittensor or anywhere else, your storage bill is likely hefty. Hippius is the storage choice for anyone doing serious AI work who’s tired of getting nickel-and-dimed every time they pull down a dataset.

Learn more about Hippius: