Tapes

Every byte stored on Tapedrive lives in a tape. A tape is a prepaid reservation: an amount of space, for a length of time measured in epochs. You pay once, in TAPE tokens, and that’s the whole storage bill. If you’re coming from S3, a tape will feel bucket-like. It’s the container your files go into, and the S3 gateway builds real buckets on top: a bucket is a tape. The details live in the S3 gateway docs.

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Reserving a tape

Pick a capacity and a duration, pay once. The cost is the network’s current storage price × capacity × epochs, and node operators set that price by vote. Token economics covers where the payment goes. The default price works out to about 1 TAPE per tebibyte per epoch, and the live price can move, so price a reservation against current chain state rather than a fixed number. There is no subscription behind any of this. No account to top up, no monthly bill, no per-request charges. The reservation is the entire storage cost, and the protocol charges nothing to read data back. Read service comes from gateways. The quickstart walks through the actual reserve call.

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One tape, one key

Every tape is controlled by a single keypair, the TapeKey, generated when you reserve. Its public key is the tape’s address, and whoever holds the private key owns the tape. That’s the entire ownership model.

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Delegation

A tape’s owner can name a delegate: a second key allowed to register, certify, and delete tracks on the tape without owning it. You can revoke the delegate at any time. This is how a hosted S3 gateway writes to your tape without ever holding your TapeKey. You delegate to the gateway’s key, and every S3 upload lands on a tape you still own. See the S3 gateway docs.

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What a tape holds

A tape holds up to 65,536 tracks, the unit of raw data on Tapedrive, covered on the tracks page. All of them are committed into a single Merkle tree, so the chain stores one small commitment per tape while every individual track stays provable against it. Capacity is accounted as you go: used space goes up on writes, comes back down on deletes, and never exceeds what you reserved. The tape itself is bookkeeping. What lands on storage nodes are erasure-coded slices of your tracks, spread across a spool group. The tape is the on-chain record those slices must add up to.

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Lifecycle

After reservation, a tape supports two operations:

• Extend: add capacity or add epochs. One instruction covers both, and it’s permissionless: anyone can pay to extend a tape, not only its owner. (tape extend and tape resize in the CLI.)
• Delegate / revoke: grant or remove the write delegate described above. (In the SDK: managing tapes.)

When a tape’s time runs out, its data is deleted. Permissionless extension is the way around that hard rule: keeping data alive doesn’t require the original owner. A service, a DAO, or anyone who cares about the data can fund an extension, no keys involved.

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Tapes beyond user data

The tape is the network’s universal container. The protocol keeps its own records (epoch snapshots, history, blacklists) on system tapes that work exactly like yours.

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Tape vs TAPE