In Q3 of last year, the three mainstream decentralized storage networks—Arweave, Filecoin, and Storj—collectively entered a period of explosive growth.

Let's look at the data: Arweave's permanent storage capacity surpassed 200TB, with the unit storage cost dropping to $0.03 per GB/year—this price makes traditional cloud storage solutions somewhat awkward. During the same period, the number of Filecoin storage service providers exceeded 4,000, with total storage capacity reaching an astonishing 25EB. Many people might not have a concept of this; it’s equivalent to the total data volume of a small internet company over ten years.

Storj's growth is even more intuitive—enterprise users increased by 150% quarter-over-quarter, and major companies like Netflix and Disney have started shifting some storage needs to their platform. This indicates that decentralized storage is gradually being recognized by mainstream content providers from a niche technology.

On the cost front, the overall comparison results are eye-opening: the total cost of decentralized storage solutions has already fallen below the standard storage price of AWS S3. But the reality is also quite harsh—when it comes to data retrieval speed, these decentralized solutions are still 5-10 times slower. This gap means they currently cannot replace scenarios that require strict response times, but as cold storage, backups, or media repositories, their potential is indeed significant.