The Evolution of Decentralization Storage Technology: From FIL to Shelby

Decentralization storage technology has undergone an evolution from proof of concept to practical application. Early projects such as FIL and Arweave mainly focused on decentralization and permanent storage, but faced challenges in performance and cost in practical applications. Recent projects like Walrus and Shelby place more emphasis on addressing the actual needs of hot data storage, attempting to strike a balance between decentralization and performance.

Filecoin: The Pioneer of Storage Mining Coins

Filecoin is built on IPFS and aims to establish an incentive-driven Decentralization storage network. However, the design of IPFS is mainly suitable for cold data, showing significant disadvantages in hot data processing. Although Filecoin's token economic model incentivizes the provision of storage space, it also has potential for malicious behavior, making it more like a mining coin project rather than a practical storage solution.

Arweave: The Pursuer of Permanent Storage

Arweave has taken another extreme, committed to providing permanent storage. Its long-termism philosophy has gained popularity in bull markets, but it also limits its application scenarios. Arweave's technical roadmap focuses on lowering participation barriers and enhancing network robustness, but its response to market demand is relatively lagging.

Walrus: A New Attempt at Hot Data Storage

Walrus aims to solve the hot data storage problem by optimizing storage costs. Its self-developed RedStuff encoding algorithm is an improvement over traditional erasure coding, designed to reduce redundancy and improve recovery efficiency. Walrus primarily provides hot storage services for Web3 content assets such as NFTs, relying on the high performance of the Sui public chain to support its operations.

Shelby: A New Direction for Performance Breakthroughs

Shelby's innovation lies in the introduction of a dedicated fiber optic network and Paid Reads mechanism, directly addressing the reading performance issues in decentralized storage. By building an underlying network architecture similar to centralized cloud services, Shelby has the potential to provide a user experience comparable to Web2. Its Clay Codes encoding scheme also significantly reduces storage redundancy, improving performance and cost efficiency.

Conclusion

Decentralization storage technology is moving from the proof-of-concept stage to the practical stage. The emergence of Shelby marks the industry's growing emphasis on actual application needs, seeking a balance between decentralization and performance. The future development direction is likely to focus on users' real pain points, building usable, integrable, and sustainable storage infrastructure.