The storage track will enter a critical period of technological upgrade in 2026. From the ecosystem chains of Filecoin, Arweave, to ICP, the core competitiveness is evolving from simple decentralized storage to on-chain applications and cross-chain interoperability.

**Reshaping the Underlying Architecture**

The Filecoin mainnet remains the cornerstone of this ecosystem, providing verifiable storage proofs and consensus mechanisms. But the real change lies in the maturity of the FVM (Virtual Machine Environment)—it is compatible with Ethereum smart contracts, meaning developers can deploy applications on Filecoin just like on Ethereum. Coupled with the content-addressed network of IPFS, data distribution efficiency has achieved a qualitative leap.

By October, miner rewards will undergo a halving, which is not only a signal of supply-side deflation but also a major adjustment to the entire economic model.

**Three Key Focus Areas for Technological Breakthroughs in 2026**

FOC (On-Chain Cloud Services) will go live on the mainnet in Q1, which is crucial. Hot storage can be paid for directly on-chain, retrieval latency is controlled within 500ms, and it is compatible with S3 interfaces—almost transparent to enterprise users. Filecoin Beam acts like a global CDN network, significantly improving access speed for hot data.

The cross-subnet parallel execution capability of IPC (Interstellar Consensus) addresses the longstanding challenge of network scalability. Meanwhile, cross-chain bridging and interactions with EVM ecosystems like Ethereum and Polygon have increased by 30%, and the launch of the USDFC stablecoin further streamlines value flow.

These technology stacks are interconnected rather than isolated. The underlying storage has become a truly usable computing and resource management platform, which is where the real opportunity in the storage track in 2026 lies.