The Evolution of Decentralization Storage: From Concept to Practical Use

Decentralized storage was once one of the top narratives in the blockchain industry, with Filecoin and Arweave as representative projects reaching high market values. However, as the limitations of cold data storage have been revealed and the necessity of permanent storage is questioned, the development prospects of this track have fallen into ambiguity. Recently, the emergence of Walrus and Shelby has brought new vitality to the long-dormant storage narrative. This article will analyze the narrative changes of decentralized storage from the development paths of Filecoin, Arweave, Walrus, and Shelby, exploring the possibilities for its popularization.

Filecoin: The Essence of Mining Under the Name of Storage

Filecoin, as one of the early rising projects, has its development direction centered around Decentralization. It links storage with Decentralization, attempting to address the trust issues associated with centralized data storage providers. However, certain aspects sacrificed for the sake of Decentralization have become pain points that subsequent projects aim to resolve.

IPFS: Architecture Decentralization, but constrained by transmission bottlenecks

IPFS aims to disrupt the traditional HTTP protocol through content addressing, but its biggest drawback is the extremely slow retrieval speed. In an era where traditional data services can achieve millisecond-level response times, retrieving files from IPFS still takes tens of seconds, making it difficult to promote in practical applications. IPFS is mainly suitable for "cold data" and does not have significant advantages in handling hot data.

Although IPFS is not a blockchain, its directed acyclic graph design aligns closely with many public chains and Web3 protocols, making it suitable as a foundational building framework for blockchain.

Logic of mining coins under the storage cloak

The token economic model of Filecoin includes three roles: users, storage miners, and retrieval miners. However, this model has potential spaces for malicious behavior. Storage miners may fill the system with junk data to earn rewards, and Filecoin's proof of replication consensus cannot prevent this behavior.

The operation of Filecoin largely relies on the continuous investment of miners in the token economy, rather than on the real demand for distributed storage from end users. At this stage, the ecological construction of Filecoin aligns more with the "mining coin logic" rather than the definition of a storage project that is "application-driven."

Arweave: The Dilemma of Long-termism

The design goal of Arweave is to provide permanent storage capability for data. It does not attempt to build a distributed computing platform, but is based on the assumption that "important data should be stored once and retained forever." This extreme long-termism makes Arweave vastly different from Filecoin in terms of mechanisms, incentive models, hardware requirements, and narrative perspectives.

Arweave focuses on Bitcoin as a learning object and is committed to continuously optimizing its permanent storage network over the long term. Even when market attention wanes, Arweave remains steadfast in its long-termism approach, continuously iterating its network architecture.

Version 1.5-2.9 Upgrade Review

During the upgrade process from version 1.5 to 2.9, Arweave continuously optimized its network structure, lowered participation thresholds, and improved network robustness.

• Version 1.7 introduces the RandomX algorithm, limiting the use of specialized computing power.
• Version 2.0 adopts SPoA, optimizing the data proof structure.
• The 2.4 version introduces the SPoRA mechanism, which requires miners to genuinely hold data.
• Versions 2.6-2.9 further enhance network collaboration capabilities and storage diversity.

This upgrade path clearly demonstrates Arweave's storage-oriented long-term strategy: while resisting the trend of computational power centralization, it continuously lowers the participation threshold to ensure the long-term viability of the protocol.

Walrus: A New Attempt at Hot Data Storage

The design concept of Walrus is completely different from that of Filecoin and Arweave, with its starting point being the optimization of storage costs for hot data storage protocols.

RedStuff Encoding: Cost Innovation or Old Wine in New Bottles?

Walrus believes that the storage costs of Filecoin and Arweave are unreasonable, so it proposed its own RedStuff encoding algorithm. RedStuff is derived from Reed-Solomon(RS) encoding and is a lightweight redundancy and recovery protocol redesigned for Decentralization scenarios.

The core design of RedStuff is to split data into primary slices and secondary slices:

• The main slices are used to restore the original data, and generation and distribution are strictly constrained.
• The sub-slice is generated through simple calculations, providing elastic fault tolerance.

This structure reduces the requirements for data consistency, allowing different nodes to temporarily store different versions of data, emphasizing "eventual consistency". Although it has some effect in reducing network burden, it also weakens the assurance of data availability and integrity.

RedStuff has achieved effective storage in low computing power and low bandwidth environments, but it essentially remains a variant of erasure coding systems. It avoids the high coupling points of traditional architectures through structural strategies, with innovation being more reflected in the combinatorial optimization on the engineering side rather than a disruption at the foundational algorithm level.

Sui and Walrus: Can High-Performance Public Chains Promote the Practicality of Storage?

The core positioning of Walrus is to serve as a hot storage system for content assets such as NFTs, emphasizing dynamic calls, real-time updates, and version management capabilities. It builds a high-speed data retrieval network leveraging the high-performance chain capabilities of Sui, reducing operational costs.

The storage cost of Walrus is about one-fifth of traditional cloud services, and although it is tens of times more expensive than Filecoin and Arweave, its goal is to build a decentralized hot storage system that can be used for real business scenarios.

Sui currently does not urgently need off-chain storage support. However, if it hopes to support complex scenarios such as AI applications and content assetization in the future, the storage layer will be indispensable in providing context, context, and indexing capabilities.

Shelby: Dedicated Fiber Network Unlocks the Potential of Web3 Applications

Shelby aims to address the "read performance" bottleneck faced by Web3 applications at its core. Its key innovations include:

1. Paid Reads mechanism: Links user experience directly to service node revenue, incentivizing performance improvement.

2. Dedicated Fiber Network: Build a high-performance transmission backbone for instant reading of Web3 hot data, significantly reducing latency and ensuring bandwidth stability.

3. Efficient Coding Scheme: Achieve storage redundancy as low as <2x through Clay Codes while maintaining high durability and availability.

These innovations make Shelby the first decentralized hot storage protocol capable of delivering a Web2-level user experience, opening up real implementation possibilities for Web3 applications in terms of high-frequency reads, high-bandwidth scheduling, and low-cost edge access.

Conclusion

From Filecoin to Shelby, the narrative of decentralized storage has shifted from a technological utopia to a realism route. The emergence of Shelby opens up the possibility of a "performance without compromise" path, breaking the binary paradox of "either censorship-resistant or user-friendly."

The popularization of decentralized storage must move towards an application-driven stage of "usable, integrable, and sustainable." Whoever can first solve the real pain points of users will reshape the narrative of the next round of infrastructure. Shelby's breakthrough may mark the beginning of a new era, as decentralized storage shifts from a mining coin logic to a usage logic.