Decentralization Storage Development History and Future Outlook

Decentralized storage was once one of the hot tracks in the blockchain field. Filecoin and Arweave, as representative projects, once reached a market value of tens of billions of dollars. However, over time, the practicality of cold data storage and the necessity of permanent storage have been questioned, casting doubt on the prospects of decentralized storage. Recently, the emergence of Walrus and Shelby has brought new vitality to this field, especially showing new possibilities in hot data storage. This article will review the development paths of several major projects, analyze the changes in the narrative of decentralized storage, and explore the popularization prospects of this technology.

Filecoin: The Essence of Mining Coins Under the Storage Veil

Filecoin is one of the early rising blockchain projects, with its development direction centered around Decentralization. It aims to combine storage with Decentralization to address the trust issues associated with centralized data storage service providers. However, the underlying technology of Filecoin, IPFS, has objective limitations such as slow retrieval speed, making it difficult to apply in hot data scenarios.

Although IPFS is not a blockchain, its directed acyclic graph design is highly compatible with many public chains, making it suitable as a foundational framework for blockchain. However, without economic incentives, it is difficult for users to voluntarily become active storage nodes. Filecoin was created specifically to address this issue.

The token economic model of Filecoin includes three roles: users, storage miners, and retrieval miners. However, this model has potential malicious space, as storage miners may fill in garbage data to obtain rewards. The operation of Filecoin largely relies on miners' continuous investment in the token economy, rather than on the real demand from end users for distributed storage. Therefore, Filecoin is more in line with the "mining coin logic" rather than the "application-driven" definition of storage projects.

Arweave: The Cost of Extreme Long-Termism

The design goal of Arweave is to provide permanent storage capabilities for data. It does not aim to build a distributed computing platform, but rather revolves around the core assumption that "important data should be stored once and kept forever." This extreme long-termism makes Arweave fundamentally different from Filecoin in terms of mechanisms, incentive models, and hardware requirements.

Arweave focuses on Bitcoin as a learning object, dedicated to optimizing the permanent storage network over a long period. Even when market attention decreases, Arweave continues to iterate on its network architecture. From version 1.5 to version 2.9, Arweave has been working to lower the participation threshold for miners and improve network robustness.

Arweave's upgrade path clearly demonstrates its storage-oriented long-term strategy: continuously resisting the trend of computing power centralization while consistently lowering the participation threshold to ensure the long-term viability of the protocol. However, this long-termism strategy has also brought about issues such as stagnation in ecological development.

Walrus: A New Attempt at Hot Data Storage

The design concept of Walrus is completely different from that of Filecoin and Arweave; it aims to optimize the cost efficiency of hot data storage. Walrus believes that the storage costs of Filecoin and Arweave are unreasonable and seeks to find a balance between data availability and cost efficiency.

The core technology of Walrus is the Redstuff encoding algorithm, derived from Reed-Solomon coding. Redstuff can quickly encode unstructured data blocks into smaller fragments, which are distributed and stored in a node network. Even if up to two-thirds of the fragments are lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed. This allows Walrus to provide high data reliability while maintaining a low replication factor.

Walrus is primarily aimed at hot storage scenarios for content assets such as NFTs, emphasizing dynamic invocation, real-time updates, and version management capabilities. It relies on the high performance of the Sui public chain to build a high-speed data retrieval network, thereby significantly reducing operational costs without the need to develop a high-performance public chain independently.

Shelby: Unlocking the Potential of Web3 Applications with Dedicated Networks

Shelby aims to address the "read performance" bottleneck faced by Web3 applications at its core. It introduces the Paid Reads mechanism, directly linking user experience with service node revenue, incentivizing nodes to provide faster and more stable data return services.

Shelby's biggest technological breakthrough is the introduction of a dedicated fiber optic network, providing a high-performance transmission channel for the real-time reading of Web3 hot data. This architecture bypasses the public internet, significantly reducing communication latency across nodes, while ensuring the predictability and stability of transmission bandwidth.

In terms of data persistence and cost, Shelby adopts an Efficient Coding Scheme built with Clay Codes, achieving as low as 2 times storage redundancy while maintaining high data persistence and availability. This gives Shelby an advantage in both technical efficiency and cost competitiveness.

Summary and Outlook

From Filecoin, Arweave, Walrus to Shelby, the development path of decentralized storage is clearly visible: from the technological idealism of "existence is rational" to the realism route of "usability is justice." Early projects focused on decentralization and economic incentives, but overlooked actual user needs. As the industry develops, the importance of performance, cost, and application scenarios has become increasingly prominent.

The emergence of Shelby marks the first systematic response to "Web2-level usability" in decentralized storage. It reconstructs the capabilities originally exclusive to centralized cloud platforms for the Web3 world through dedicated networks, efficient coding, and innovative incentive mechanisms. Although it still faces challenges such as developer ecosystems and permission management, Shelby opens up a possible path for the industry with "uncompromised performance."

The road to the popularity of decentralized storage needs to shift from conceptual hype and token speculation to an application-driven stage of "usable, integrable, and sustainable". In the future, projects that can effectively address user pain points will have the opportunity to reshape the narrative of infrastructure. The shift from mining logic to usage logic may herald the beginning of a new era in the decentralized storage industry.