Decentralized storage is currently a $9 billion sector within crypto. Two, thirds of that 9 billion or $6 billion is actually dominated by only three projects. ICP, Filecoin and Arweave. It is a super important and rapidly growing sector, and if you think about it, if your data and your websites aren’t hosted in a decentralized way, then really, how decentralized are your applications?
Very likely not decentralized at all, and certainly not decentralized enough. Decentralized storage is part of the core ethos of cryptocurrency, and now there’s a new kid on the block ready to use its unique technology and to make a mark. We’re exploring the next generation of decentralized storage with Walrus.
The State of Decentralized Storage
Let’s talk about the state of decentralized storage, at least as it exists right now, as a sub sector within cryptocurrency. Like I said, right now, Filecoin and Arweave dominate the market. Filecoin dominates in NFT, metadata storage leveraging, of course, its integration with IPFS. And the fact is, they do have centralization issues at times, as we see here at the node level.
Arweave dominates in file storage for things like running apps and websites in particular.
Most big files today are now stored as BLOBs, BLOB, and this includes media like images and video or different multimedia types. Essentially, a BLOB is just a chunk of data that doesn’t need to follow any sort of structure in order to be compatible with the storage solution. It’s also known as and called unstructured data.
