Many financial-related Web3 applications emerged in Defi Summer 2020. But with the rise of concepts like NFT, Gamefi, and Metaverse, DApps have begun to develop from the field of Defi to images and games. Various decentralized applications have an increasing demand for storage. However, the existing blockchains have limited storage space and high cost, making it unsustainable to meet the growing need for storage.
- Comparison of blockchain storage costs
（Origin： Layer-1 Performance: Comparing 6 Leading Blockchains）
As shown in the figure, the cost of storing 1GB of data on the Ethereum mainnet is approximately $73,000,000, and storage on Solana costs approximately $1 million per GB.
Similarly, the cost of storing 1GB of data on Avalanche is $988,000. With the popularity of these Blockchains, the price will continue to rise. Due to the high cost of storing data on-chain, most DApps usually rely on centralized servers and cloud providers (such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure) to store data. For example, due to the storage limitations of Ethereum, most NFT files on Ethereum are stored in IPFS or other centralized platforms.
While FileCoin and Arweave are decentralized storage solutions, they do not come free of their own drawbacks. FileCoin is a complex system, and its storage services are significantly more expensive than their centralized counterpart (AWS, Google Cloud). Furthermore, Filecoin has a data storage market and a data extraction market, therefore, users are charged two fees. The storage fee gives users access to the data, while the extraction fee varies according to the market conditions for data extraction. This will also result in the user’s data access rights not being guaranteed.
In Arweave’s case, It is difficult to deeply integrate Arweave into existing blockchains, since it is incompatible with EVM, and Dapps on other chains cannot easily migrate to it. As Web3 application growth increases the demands on blockchain performance,…
