Chainfeeds Introduction:
Starting from the development paths of Filecoin, Arweave, Walrus, and Shelby, this article analyzes the narrative evolution of decentralized storage, attempting to find an answer: How far is the popularization of decentralized storage?
Article Source:
https://x.com/MovemakerCN/status/1938115722011676712
Article Author:
kevin
Perspective:
kevin: Filecoin's operational logic is essentially a mining token architecture. Although the project superficially focuses on decentralized storage, the core driving force of its ecosystem has always been the token economic benefits of miners, rather than the actual storage needs of end users. Due to IPFS's slow retrieval speed and unsuitability for hot data scenarios, a large number of storage nodes in the Filecoin network fill up with junk data to obtain rewards without being responsible for data retrieval, creating a situation where storage is equivalent to no storage. While the proof of replication mechanism can prevent miners from arbitrarily deleting data, it cannot prevent them from uploading useless data to fraudulently obtain rewards. This mechanism incentivizes miners to continuously invest in hardware and bandwidth to earn tokens, rather than optimize user experience. As a result, Filecoin's storage market is more focused on the game of pledging, mortgaging, penalties, and rewards, rather than real data circulation and calls. From the overall design, Filecoin inherits the early copycat projects' mining-driven economic model, merely wrapping the miner incentives in a decentralized storage cloak. Although Filecoin continues to optimize functions and expand its ecosystem, for now, it is more like a financially driven system through mining, rather than a storage protocol that truly meets application needs. Arweave represents an extreme long-termist thinking: it does not seek frequent use or instant data reading, but is committed to providing a one-time permanent preservation capability for important data. Its narrative foundation is not technical performance, but storage philosophy. This positioning made Arweave explode during the bull market due to its narrative and become silent in the bear market. The mainnet upgrade from version 1.5 to 2.9 continuously suppresses mining behaviors dependent on computing power, promoting real data ownership as the core mining threshold. For example, introducing SPoRA, global indexing, and slow hash mechanisms encourages miners to optimize read and write performance rather than stacking GPUs, reducing dependence on high-performance hardware. Arweave uses a series of underlying adjustments to incentivize miners to preserve data at the lowest cost, and its architectural changes are the result of continuous evolution around the goal of maintaining long-term network robustness. However, the overly idealistic design also limits its usage frequency and scenario breadth in daily applications. Arweave does not pursue user scale or cater to market preferences, with a cold ecosystem that even ignores growth indicators, betting on the value of time and memory. The question is, in the increasingly competitive field of decentralized infrastructure commercialization, are there enough "data worth permanent preservation" to support its value model? Walrus did not follow Filecoin's mining token logic or Arweave's permanent storage positioning, but instead took a different path, focusing on "hot data" storage, especially for frequently called and updated data needs in Web3 applications such as Non-Fungible Tokens and social media content. Its biggest technical highlight is the independently developed RedStuff encoding scheme, an improved erasure coding mechanism in decentralized scenarios. RedStuff achieves low-cost, high-fault-tolerance data recovery capabilities by combining primary/secondary slice structures with on-chain Proof verification. Compared to traditional RS encoding, RedStuff focuses more on asynchronous collaboration between nodes, edge device adaptation, and ultimate consistency tolerance, sacrificing some immediate availability for broad participation. It no longer pursues strong consistency and rapid decoding but optimizes node costs and network adaptability in structural strategies. Nevertheless, RedStuff has not truly breakthrough the bottleneck of erasure coding systems in encoding calculations, and its engineering innovation remains limited to trade-offs and improvements. Walrus relies on the Sui blockchain to provide high-performance infrastructure, positioning itself as a "low-cost, verifiable, and scalable hot data storage system," but whether its ecosystem can truly scale depends on the growth of Web3 content applications and the actual implementation of hot storage needs.
