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Portal Accounts

What are Portal Accounts?

Accounts on a Skynet Portal allow users to register with a portal for a better experience. On some portals, account holders get access to faster speeds and greater amounts of stored data. On some portals, only account holders are able to access data on Skynet.
Users with an account on a portal can access a dashboard that tracks all of the files that they are actively pinning, as well as their Skynet usage history.
If you're new to Skynet or the idea of web portals, you might be interested in reading Web Portals on Skynet.
Portal Accounts are an evolving feature on Skynet and may differ from portal to portal. Here, we will be referencing how they work across siasky.net, skynetfree.net, and skynetpro.net.

Why Portal Accounts?

Decentralized infrastructure like a Skynet Portal isn't free to run or to develop.
A huge part of our vision for Skynet is that the entire platform will always be available to everyone. Free users will always have the same level of access to Skynet as paid users, just maybe at slightly slower speeds or sharing their connection with a larger number of users. We see access to the Internet and ownership over one’s data as a fundamental human right, and we wish to bring that to all of humanity, irrespective of a person’s ability to pay.
But, free storage and web hosting also attract abuse, and we want portal operators to be able to control who can use their portal and also provide tools that let users share in the cost of running a portal and storing data on Skynet.

Further Reading