In the crypto investment circle, everyone is always focused on the Layer 1 throughput race or competing over DeFi yields. But after years of navigating this industry, I am increasingly convinced of a widely overlooked fact: all the prosperity of Web3 ultimately depends on the physical infrastructure of data.

Imagine this: NFTs evolving from static images into three-dimensional assets, on-chain games striving for AAA experiences, AI agents continuously producing training data day and night—current infrastructure simply cannot handle it.

What is the real situation? The traditional decentralized storage protocols are expensive and slow. They pursue decentralization at all costs, completely sacrificing commercial usability. As a result, most Web3 applications still cannot escape the grasp of centralized cloud services like AWS. That’s not true decentralization; frankly, it’s self-deception.

So why are some people excited about new storage solutions? Because these new ideas hit the pain points with a different approach—erasure coding.

Instead of redundantly backing up the entire file, it uses mathematics to split the file into multiple fragments. This seemingly minor change actually brings two explosive results: storage costs plummet directly, becoming even cheaper than traditional cloud services; read speeds skyrocket exponentially, leveraging the consensus advantages of high-performance public chains like Sui, enabling the storage layer to support real-time streaming data at media levels.

This is not just a technological breakthrough but also a rewriting of the business model. When infrastructure costs and speeds are addressed, the imagination space for Web3 applications is truly unlocked.