Decentralized storage has been around for over ten years since the emergence of IPFS. During this period, countless projects have sprung up, but only a few have achieved scale and widespread adoption.

Filecoin, backed by Protocol Labs and supported by a vast miner ecosystem, has secured the top position. Arweave has attracted a large number of loyal users with its flagship permanent storage solution. As for Walrus, which recently exploded in the Sui ecosystem, its selling points are clear—efficient erasure coding combined with low costs.

Having long experimented with various storage solutions myself, I took the time to analyze the underlying technologies, cost models, and practical experiences of these three projects. Especially in the increasingly popular application scenario of AI data storage, I wanted to see which one performs better.

Let's start with the technical architecture. The design philosophies of these three protocols are quite different. Filecoin is essentially a storage market—miners provide hard drive capacity, users negotiate deals through contracts, and the protocol uses PoRep and PoSt proof mechanisms to ensure miners are actually storing the data. This design is very rigorous but also complex. You need to negotiate with miners, decide on the number of replicas, and manage the entire deal lifecycle.

Arweave takes a completely different approach. Users pay once for permanent storage, with data distributed across the network nodes via the Blockweave architecture, relying on the PoA mechanism to ensure nodes honestly store historical data.

Walrus's approach is more interesting—it combines best practices from traditional distributed storage systems with blockchain technology. It mainly uses Sui as...