The Evolution of Decentralization Storage: From Concept to Practicality

Decentralization storage has been one of the hot topics in the blockchain industry. Filecoin, as a pioneer, once had a market value exceeding $10 billion, while Arweave reached a peak of $3.5 billion with the concept of permanent storage. However, as the feasibility of cold data storage has come under question, the necessity of decentralization storage has also been challenged. Recently, the Shelby project launched by Walrus and Aptos in collaboration with Jump Crypto has brought new attention to this field. This article will explore the evolution of decentralization storage by analyzing the development trajectories of the four projects: Filecoin, Arweave, Walrus, and Shelby, and attempt to answer a key question: How far is decentralization storage from widespread application?

Filecoin: The Essence of Cryptocurrency Beneath the Storage Exterior

Filecoin is one of the early rising cryptocurrency projects, with its development direction revolving around Decentralization. The project connects storage with Decentralization, aiming to address the trust issues related to centralized data storage service providers. However, in the process of achieving Decentralization, Filecoin sacrificed certain aspects, which later became pain points that projects like Arweave or Walrus attempted to solve.

The underlying technology of Filecoin, IPFS, has the problem of slow retrieval speeds, making it difficult to promote in practical applications. IPFS is mainly suitable for "cold data," which refers to static content that does not change frequently, and it does not have a significant advantage in handling hot data. Although IPFS is not a blockchain, its directed acyclic graph design is highly compatible with many public chains and Web3 protocols, making it a foundational framework for blockchain.

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 garbage data to obtain rewards. The operation of Filecoin largely relies on miners' continuous investment in the token economy, rather than the actual demand for decentralized storage from end users.

Arweave: Ultimate Long-Termism

The design goal of Arweave is to provide permanent storage capabilities for data. The project does not attempt to build a distributed computing platform, but instead revolves around a core assumption—that important data should be stored once and retained permanently on the network. This extreme long-termism makes Arweave fundamentally different from Filecoin in terms of mechanisms, incentive models, hardware requirements, and narrative.

Arweave takes Bitcoin as its learning object, focusing on continuously optimizing its permanent storage network over the long term. The project does not focus on marketing or competitors, but solely on iterating its network architecture. This long-termism has made Arweave popular in the last bull market and may continue to exist even in times of market downturn. However, the value of permanent storage still needs time to be validated.

During the upgrade process from version 1.5 to version 2.9, Arweave has continuously worked to reduce the participation costs for miners and enhance network robustness. The project has taken a conservative approach, not embracing miner communities, upgrading the mainnet at minimal cost while lowering hardware thresholds without compromising network security.

Walrus: A New Attempt at Hot Data Storage

The design philosophy of Walrus is completely different from that of Filecoin and Arweave. Its starting point is to optimize the storage overhead of hot data storage protocols. Walrus believes that the storage costs of Filecoin and Arweave are unreasonable and tries to find a balance between data availability and cost efficiency.

The core technology of Walrus, Redstuff, is derived from Reed-Solomon (RS) coding. It is a lightweight redundancy and recovery protocol redesigned for decentralized scenarios. Redstuff splits data into primary slices and secondary slices, reducing the requirements for data consistency, but at the same time weakening the guarantees of data availability and integrity.

The main target scenario of Walrus is to store large binary files (Blobs), such as images and videos in NFTs and social media content. The project relies on Sui's high-performance chain capabilities to build a high-speed data retrieval network to reduce operational costs. The storage cost of Walrus is about one-fifth that of traditional cloud services, but it is several times more expensive than Filecoin and Arweave.

Shelby: Unlocking the Potential of Web3 Applications with Dedicated Networks

Shelby aims to address the "read performance" bottleneck of decentralized storage at its roots. The project introduces the Paid Reads mechanism, linking user experience directly to service node revenue. Shelby's biggest technological breakthrough is the introduction of a dedicated fiber optic network, providing a high-performance transmission channel for the instant reading of Web3 hot data.

Shelby adopts the Efficient Coding Scheme built with Clay Codes, achieving storage redundancy as low as <2x, while maintaining high durability and availability. This gives Shelby an advantage in both technical efficiency and cost competitiveness.

Conclusion

The evolution from Filecoin to Shelby shows that Decentralization storage is gradually moving from a technological utopia to a more realistic approach. Early projects focused on concepts and economic incentives, while later projects pay more attention to practical applications and performance. The emergence of Shelby opens up the possibility of "performance without compromise" for Decentralization storage, breaking the binary paradox of "either censorship-resistant or user-friendly."

The popularization of decentralized storage needs to move towards an "available, integrable, and sustainable" application-driven phase. In the future, projects that can first address the real pain points of users will have the opportunity to reshape the narrative of infrastructure. Shelby's breakthrough may mark the beginning of the transition of decentralized storage from a mining coin logic to a usage logic.