Web3 Infrastructure: The Importance of Data, Storage, and Computing

The core of Web3 lies in allowing users to truly own their data and assets. Blockchain technology is key to achieving this goal. With the evolution from Web1 to Web3, the amount of data has grown exponentially. Data carries important information such as identity, assets, and interaction history, making it a crucial component of Web3. The processing of data has given rise to two core areas: storage and computing, which are also indispensable infrastructures for Web3.

Blockchain projects focused on data, storage, and computation form an important cornerstone of Web3. This article will analyze these areas and explore the current state, characteristics, and future prospects of Web3 infrastructure.

Current State of Web3 Infrastructure

Although some once highly publicized star projects such as Filecoin, Arweave, and Dfinity have lost their popularity, they are still continuing to build. From the perspective of development activity, ecological richness, and social media updates, these projects remain vibrant.

The development activity of projects like Filecoin, Dfinity, and Chainlink is close to that of Ethereum. The ecosystems of Filecoin, Near, Oasis, Dfinity, and Chainlink are quite prosperous, with the number of applications reaching 97, 811, 127, 80, and 1493 respectively, covering areas such as storage, NFTs, games, and DeFi.

This indicates that the Web3 infrastructure is becoming more robust. The main bottleneck they face for development may be how to achieve broader adoption.

Data: The primitives of Web3

Web3 data infrastructure mainly includes oracles, data indexing protocols, and public chains focused on DID. Representative projects include Ceramic, Chainlink, The Graph, etc., with their average funding amount being in the tens of millions of dollars.

Data in the Web3 era has the characteristic of being open-source, no longer monopolized by centralized platforms, but instead can flow freely. This grants data greater composability potential. For example, Ceramic helps Gitcoin Passport store user identity credentials, and this data becomes part of the CyberConnect social graph.

However, as users' on-chain and off-chain behaviors increase, data privacy issues are becoming more prominent. Some data protocols emphasize protecting user privacy through encryption technology while releasing the value of data. For example, Sismo protects user privacy through ZK badges. Another solution is to use privacy protocols to mask the data.

As middleware between DAPPS, data protocols can easily create network effects. Chainlink and The Graph have achieved high market share and brand effect through collaboration with other DAPPS.

Storage Public Chain: Pursuing Innovation and Adapting to the Market

After a round of elimination, distributed storage projects have entered a period of accumulation. Representative projects include Filecoin, Storj, Arweave, Sia, and Crust. They are continuously improving developer tools, attracting more project integrations, and exploring richer ecosystems, more innovations, and better business models.

Public storage chains exhibit the following characteristics:

1. Token incentives as a core element, forming a spontaneous market.
2. Decentralized storage resource provision
3. Different competitive strategies, such as Arweave focusing on permanent storage, and Filecoin offering low-cost on-demand storage.
4. Follow market trends, such as providing NFT storage services.

Excellent storage public chains are innovating according to market trends, rather than sticking to their original business models, which is beneficial for their long-term development.

Public Chain: Pursuing Wider Adoption

There is huge demand for computing in the market. Representative computing public chains include Dfinity, Near, Oasis, Aptos, Sui, Phala, Akash, and others. The market has high expectations for high-performance public chains, with several projects raising over a hundred million dollars in financing.

These public chains achieve high TPS through innovative consensus mechanisms, with Near and Aptos targeting a TPS of up to 100,000 transactions per second. Some established public chains like Dfinity, Oasis, and Near have a quite rich ecosystem, covering areas such as NFTs, DeFi, blockchain games, the metaverse, and social networking.

However, despite strong technological capabilities, high-performance public chains have yet to achieve true widespread adoption. Possible reasons include a lack of price incentives and a pursuit of market trends. They may need to be more inclusive of trending projects and new gameplay, foster flagship projects, and even propose new concepts to attract users.

The new generation of high-performance public chains like Aptos and Sui are emphasizing the "Move language" narrative and attracting users through high-threshold incentive testnets. Application chains may become a new trend, such as Evmos, which focuses on EVM compatibility, and Secret Network, which focuses on privacy.

Future Development and Outlook

The Web3 infrastructure is gradually improving, providing high-speed computing, convenient storage, privacy protection, and other functions for applications. However, current applications still expose the shortcomings of the infrastructure, such as the lack of a unified identity system and standards.

The Web3 ecosystem is still in the "fat protocol, thin application" stage, and there is significant room for improvement in infrastructure. At this stage, infrastructure may capture more industry value ahead of applications.

In the future, as on-chain data becomes richer, storage solutions are optimized, privacy protection is strengthened, public chain performance is enhanced, and cross-chain interoperability is improved, Web3 will be better able to support various applications. At that time, users, assets, commerce, entertainment games, and social interactions in real life will truly integrate into the Web3 world, forming a decentralized, free, and rich ecosystem.