Talking about blockchain, everyone starts to argue about TPS, public chain performance, and DeFi yields. But the industry quietly avoids a painful question: where exactly is the data stored?

The bored ape you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on, is that picture really stored on Ethereum? Dream on. It’s probably lying on a hard drive of some centralized server. If the cloud provider suddenly cuts off, or the project team stops paying, your NFT becomes just a useless hash code.

Public chains like Ethereum and Solana are essentially "brains without memory." They have strong CPU computing power, but storage is a major weakness. Want to store 1GB of data on Ethereum? Be prepared to spend millions of dollars. That’s the crux: Web3 claims to be decentralized, but when it comes to the most critical storage layer, it still relies on centralized infrastructure.

Thus, Filecoin(FIL) and Arweave(AR) emerged. Both are ambitious and indeed pioneers. But the problem is, their technical approaches are already somewhat outdated. Filecoin’s proof-of-replication mechanism is cumbersome and inefficient, and data retrieval speed can’t keep up; Arweave, while creative, has cost structures and scalability issues of its own.

Essentially, this generation of storage solutions is still using old methods to tackle new problems. When a more elegant answer will emerge, no one can say for sure.