The Future of Decentralization Storage: The Evolution from FIL to Shelby

Storage has been one of the热门赛道 in the blockchain industry, with Filecoin and Arweave as representative projects once boasting huge market values. However, as the availability of cold data storage has come into question, the development of decentralized storage has encountered bottlenecks. Recently, the emergence of Walrus and Shelby has brought new possibilities to this field. This article will analyze the evolution of decentralized storage from the development paths of these projects and explore its future prospects.

FIL: The Essence of Mining under the Name of Storage

Filecoin, as an early decentralized storage project, attempts to combine storage with Decentralization. However, its underlying technology IPFS has significant disadvantages in handling hot data, with slow access speeds that are difficult to meet actual application needs.

The token economic model of Filecoin is designed with three roles: users, storage miners, and retrieval miners. However, this model has potential vulnerabilities, as miners may obtain rewards by filling the network with garbage data. The operation of Filecoin largely depends on the continuous investment of miners in the token economy, rather than on the genuine needs of end users. Therefore, Filecoin aligns more with the "mining coin logic" rather than the "application-driven" definition of storage projects.

Arweave: The Duality of Extreme Long-termism

The core idea of Arweave is to provide permanent storage for data. This extreme long-termism makes it very different from Filecoin in terms of mechanism design, hardware requirements, and more. The Arweave team has always focused on optimizing the network architecture, rather than overly concentrating on marketing and competitors. This persistence led to its popularity during the last bull market and allows it to maintain development even in a bear market.

From version 1.5 to 2.9, Arweave has continuously upgraded to lower the participation threshold and improve network robustness. Major improvements include the introduction of the RandomX algorithm to limit specialized computing power, the adoption of SPoA and SPoRA mechanisms requiring miners to genuinely hold data, and the optimization of block production mechanisms to balance device differences. These upgrades reflect Arweave's long-term storage-oriented strategy, continuously resisting the trend of computing power centralization and lowering the participation threshold.

Walrus: A New Attempt at Hot Data Storage

Walrus attempts to find a balance between Filecoin and Arweave, with the core focus on optimizing the overhead of hot data storage protocols. The RedStuff coding algorithm proposed by Walrus is a key technology for reducing node redundancy, derived from traditional Reed-Solomon coding.

The core design of RedStuff is to split data into primary slices and secondary slices. This structure reduces the requirement for data consistency, allowing different nodes to temporarily store different versions of data. While effective in reducing network burden, it also weakens the guarantee of data availability and integrity.

Walrus's main application direction is to serve as a hot storage system for content assets such as NFTs. It relies on the high performance of the Sui public chain to build a high-speed data retrieval network, avoiding direct competition with traditional cloud storage in terms of unit cost.

Shelby: Dedicated Network Unlocks the Potential of Web3 Applications

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

1. Paid Reads mechanism: Links user experience directly with service node income, incentivizing nodes to provide high-quality services.

2. Dedicated Fiber Network: Provides high-performance, low-latency transmission backbone for Web3 hot data access, enabling Shelby to support Web2 level user experience.

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

These innovations make Shelby the first truly capable decentralized hot storage protocol to support Web2-level user experiences.

Conclusion

From Filecoin to Shelby, the development of decentralized storage has shifted from a technological utopia to a realistic approach. The emergence of Shelby has opened a "performance uncompromised" new path for the industry, breaking the opposition between decentralization and high performance. In the future, projects that can address real user pain points will reshape the narrative landscape of infrastructure. Decentralized storage is moving from mining logic to usage logic, ushering in a new stage of development.