Development of Decentralization Storage: From FIL to Shelby

The decentralized storage sector has undergone an evolution from proof of concept to practical application. Filecoin, as an early representative, has driven the construction of hardware infrastructure through economic incentives, but has not fully met the needs of actual applications. Arweave, on the other hand, has gone to the other extreme, focusing on permanent data storage, but its application scenarios are relatively limited.

The emergence of Walrus marks the industry's focus on hot data storage and practicality. It employs an improved erasure coding algorithm, RedStuff, which reduces storage costs while increasing data availability. Walrus relies on the high performance of the Sui public chain to provide hot storage services for content assets such as NFTs, reflecting the trend of integration with high-performance public chains.

The newly emerged Shelby project further promotes the practical development of Decentralization storage. It introduces a dedicated fiber optic network and a pay-per-read mechanism, significantly enhancing data access performance, making Decentralization storage for the first time comparable to centralized cloud services in terms of user experience. The Clay Codes encoding scheme adopted by Shelby also achieves a better balance between cost and reliability.

Overall, decentralized storage is shifting from the proof-of-concept stage to an application-driven development model. Future development will focus on performance optimization, cost control, and the expansion of practical application scenarios. Projects that can effectively address user pain points and provide reliable services will have an advantage in the next round of infrastructure competition. The path to the popularization of decentralized storage still faces many challenges, but the industry has begun to emphasize practicality, which indicates the possibility of more innovations and breakthroughs.