Many people evaluate Web3 storage solutions primarily by cost, speed, and user experience. But if you really consider it from a developer's perspective, these are just superficial aspects.

The question of whether a storage protocol has a future isn't about how comfortable it is to use, but two hard metrics: whether it can handle exponential data growth, and whether it can become an indispensable infrastructure within the entire Web3 ecosystem.

Currently, there's a real contradiction in front of us. The core value proposition of blockchain is its immutability, but this is only formal. The true assets—such as your NFT images or account data in blockchain games—are mostly stored off-chain. If these external storage systems encounter issues, the asset certificates you hold become worthless paper, and the actual content of the assets is permanently lost. This fundamentally undermines the entire logic of Web3's trustworthiness.

A protocol has found this vulnerability. Instead of competing with others on low cost and high speed (which is inherently a money-burning game), it positions itself very clearly—as the data storage layer for Web3. Not to show off technical prowess, but to store data long-term, stably, and securely. The growth logic of this protocol is pure: it doesn't rely on short-term hype or market speculation, but on whether real applications will depend on it.

Imagine social apps, blockchain games, AI applications—once their data volume reaches terabytes or petabytes, centralized storage can't meet Web3's requirements, and traditional on-chain storage can't handle this pressure. At this point, the value of a professional, scalable storage layer becomes evident.

The protocol's token isn't a speculative tool. Its value comes from genuine resource coordination needs—more data writes, reads, and validations increase demand for the token. This demand is a hard requirement, not driven by hype or public opinion.

Of course, the biggest challenge for any infrastructure project is the cold start. Few users, a cold ecosystem—no matter how much innovation is invested, it won't show its value. But once this threshold is crossed, migration costs become the strongest moat. Once data is stored, switching costs are so high that no one wants to bother.

This may not be the kind of project that excites you in the short term, but in the long run, it is very likely the critical foundational layer that supports the development of the entire Web3 ecosystem.