Methods and systems for reading from and writing to a distributed, asynchronous and fault-tolerant storage system. The storage system includes storage nodes communicating with clients. The method includes a first client writing an object to the storage system and a second client reading the object from the storage system. For the first client, previous transient metadata relating to a previously written version of the object is retrieved and a new version of the object together with new transient metadata is stored. For the second client, a set of transient metadata from a third set of nodes amongst storage nodes is retrieved, a specific version of the object as stored on the storage system is determined, and a specific version of the corresponding object from a fourth set of nodes amongst storage nodes is retrieved. Two sets of nodes amongst all sets have at least one node in common.