The Evolution of Decentralization Storage: From Concept Hype to Practical Implementation

Storage has been one of the hot tracks in the blockchain field, with projects like Filecoin and Arweave once receiving much attention. However, as the availability of cold data storage has come into question, the prospects for Decentralization storage have also been called into doubt. Recently, the emergence of Walrus and Shelby has brought new ideas to this field, especially regarding optimization solutions for hot data storage. This article will analyze the evolution of Decentralization storage from the development paths of the four projects: Filecoin, Arweave, Walrus, and Shelby, and explore its future development direction.

Filecoin: The Essence of Mining Under the Storage Exterior

Filecoin, as one of the early blockchain projects, has its development direction centered around Decentralization. The project combines storage with Decentralization, attempting to solve the trust issues associated with centralized data storage providers. However, the underlying technology of Filecoin, IPFS, has an inherent flaw of slow retrieval speeds, making it difficult to meet the demands for hot data storage.

IPFS is mainly suitable for static content that does not change frequently, such as "cold data" like videos, images, and documents. When handling dynamic web pages, online games, or artificial intelligence applications, P2P protocols do not have significant advantages over traditional CDNs for "hot data". Although IPFS is not a blockchain, its directed acyclic graph design aligns closely with many public chains and Web3 protocols, making it an ideal choice for the underlying framework of blockchain.

The token economic model of Filecoin includes three roles: users, storage miners, and retrieval miners. However, this model has potential malicious space. Storage miners may obtain rewards by filling up with junk data, while Filecoin's proof of replication consensus can only ensure that user data has not been deleted, and cannot prevent this behavior.

Overall, the operation of Filecoin largely relies on miners' continuous investment in the token economy, rather than on the actual demand from end users for distributed storage. Although the project is still iterating, at this stage, Filecoin is more in line with the definition of a "mining coin" rather than an "application-driven" storage project.

Arweave: The Double-Edged Sword of Long-Termism

Arweave's design goal is to provide permanent storage capabilities for data. Unlike Filecoin, Arweave does not attempt to build a distributed computing platform, but instead focuses on one-time storage and the permanent preservation of important data. This extreme long-termism leads to significant differences between Arweave and Filecoin in terms of mechanisms, incentive models, and hardware requirements.

Arweave uses Bitcoin as a learning object and is committed to continuously optimizing its permanent storage network over the long term. The project team adheres to a long-termism philosophy, consistently iterating on the network architecture even when market reactions are tepid. This persistence has made Arweave popular in the last bull market and may allow it to weather multiple market cycles. However, the intrinsic value of permanent storage still needs time to be validated.

From version 1.5 to the recent version 2.9, the Arweave mainnet has been committed to lowering miner participation costs and improving network robustness. Major upgrades include:

1. Version 1.7 introduces the RandomX algorithm, limiting specialized computing power and requiring general-purpose CPUs to participate in mining.
2. The 2.0 version adopts the SPoA mechanism to optimize data proof and synchronization efficiency.
3. The 2.4 version introduces the SPoRA mechanism to ensure that miners genuinely hold the data.
4. Version 2.6 introduces a hash chain to control the block production rhythm, balancing the advantages of high-performance devices.
5. Versions 2.7-2.9 further optimize collaborative mining, storage diversity, and packaging efficiency.

The upgrade path of Arweave presents a clear storage-oriented strategy: while resisting the trend of computing power centralization, it continuously lowers the participation threshold, ensuring the long-term viability of the protocol.

Walrus: A New Attempt at Hot Data Storage

The design concept of Walrus is significantly different from that of Filecoin and Arweave, as its starting point is to optimize the cost of hot data storage. Walrus believes that the storage costs of the former two are unreasonable, and therefore proposes its own Redstuff technology to reduce node redundancy.

Redstuff is derived from Reed-Solomon ( RS ) coding, and is a lightweight redundancy and recovery protocol redesigned for Decentralization scenarios. Compared to traditional erasure codes, Redstuff makes realistic trade-offs in terms of data distribution, storage verification, and computation costs. Its core design is to split data into primary slices and secondary slices, balancing recovery capability and system robustness through different generation and distribution strategies.

The main application direction of Walrus is to serve as a hot storage system for content assets such as NFTs, emphasizing dynamic invocation, real-time updates, and version management capabilities. The project relies on the high performance of the Sui public chain to build a high-speed data retrieval network, reducing operating costs. According to official data, Walrus's storage costs are about one-fifth of traditional cloud services, although higher than Filecoin and Arweave, its goal is to build a decentralized hot storage system that can be used in real business scenarios.

Shelby: Dedicated Network Unleashes the Potential of Web3 Applications

Shelby is trying to address the "read performance" bottleneck faced by Web3 applications from the root. The project proposes two key innovations:

1. Paid Reads mechanism: By using a pay-per-read model, it directly links user experience with the income of service nodes, incentivizing nodes to provide faster and more stable data returns.

2. Dedicated Fiber Network: Build a high-performance, low-congestion, physically isolated transmission backbone for the instant reading of Web3 hot data, significantly reducing cross-node communication latency and ensuring the predictability and stability of transmission bandwidth.

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

Summary

From Filecoin to Shelby, the development path of decentralized storage has shown a shift from "existence is rational" to "availability is justice." Early projects focused more on proof of concept and economic incentives, while recent projects have begun to focus on practical application scenarios and performance optimization. The emergence of Shelby marks a serious consideration of "Web2-level availability" in decentralized storage, opening up a potential path for the industry of "performance without compromise."

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