Decentralized storage—how fierce is the competition in this track? The top projects number around ten, each claiming to have the leading technology, lowest costs, and strongest ecosystems. But when you compare them in real-world scenarios, you'll find that the differences are much more complex than marketing copy suggests.

Recently, I spent time delving into Walrus, while also revisiting Filecoin and Arweave. These three projects essentially represent three completely different approaches to decentralized storage.

Filecoin follows the path of market-based trading. Its core logic is clear—build a storage trading market where miners offer hard drive capacity, users pay in FIL tokens for storage, and proof-of-spacetime(Proof-of-Spacetime) ensures that miners are genuinely storing your data. This mechanism is carefully designed; theoretically, storage prices can automatically adjust based on supply and demand, competition among miners can lower costs, and users can ultimately get cheaper storage.

However, in practical operation, ideals and reality differ. Filecoin's transaction process is extremely complex—you need to find miners, negotiate prices, discuss cycles, sign contracts, and wait for data to be on-chain. The entire process involves significant time and interaction costs.

Arweave emphasizes a one-time payment for permanent storage. Pay once, and the data remains on-chain forever—no renewal fees, no worries about data being deleted. It sounds very attractive. But the question is whether this model can sustain long-term operation. It depends on whether miners' economic incentives can hold up and whether the network's reliability can truly meet the promise of permanence.

Walrus takes a different approach, betting on programmable storage and AI data markets. Simply put, storage is not just storage—it can directly participate in computation and data trading, providing data infrastructure directly to AI application developers.

To be honest, each of these three approaches has its own logic, but also its own shortcomings. None is perfect; the key will be subsequent ecosystem development and market acceptance.