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Storage as DePIN: Filecoin & Arweave

The two dominant decentralized storage paradigms — Filecoin's storage marketplace versus Arweave's pay-once permaweb — plus IPFS and the newer Walrus on Sui.

30 min · advanced · part of Decentralized Identity & DePIN

Storage as the Original DePIN

Long before DePIN was a marketing category, decentralized storage was already running on token incentives. Operators deploy hard drives and bandwidth. Users pay to store and retrieve files. Tokens mediate the value flow. The pattern is identical to Helium-mapping-GPU DePIN, just with disks instead of radios or cameras. Storage is also one of the clearer wins for decentralization. The problem that storage networks solve — durable, censorship-resistant, location-independent file storage — is a real problem. Centralized cloud (AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob) is reliable and cheap, but it is also a single point of failure for the censorship-resistance properties that some applications need. NFT metadata, legal records, archived journalism, scientific datasets, decentralized application state: all benefit from storage that does not depend on a single corporate operator. This lesson covers the four projects that matter most in 2025-2026: Filecoin (the storage marketplace with the largest economic footprint), Arweave (the pay-once permaweb), IPFS (the addressing layer that ties them together), and Walrus (the newer Sui-based contender). Each takes a different approach. Each has different tradeoffs. And each has shipped real product — not just whitepapers.

Also in this lesson

  • Filecoin: The Storage Marketplace
  • Arweave: Pay Once, Store Forever
  • Walrus: Sui-Native Storage
  • IPFS: The Addressing Layer
  • Honest Assessment: Storage in 2026

Key terms

Filecoin (FIL)
Decentralized storage marketplace launched October 2020 by Protocol Labs. Storage providers compete on price; clients pay FIL for storage deals. Network capacity peaked over 20 EiB. FVM (March 2023) added EVM-compatible smart contracts. Saturn CDN improved retrieval latency.
Arweave (AR)
Decentralized "permaweb" launched 2018. Single upfront payment funds an endowment that subsidizes storage replication for 200+ years (assuming storage costs continue declining). No deletion, no renewal — pay once, store forever.
Permaweb
Arweave's term for its store-forever model. Data uploaded to Arweave is intended to be permanently available without further payment or maintenance, funded by the endowment.
ArDrive
Dropbox-like consumer product on Arweave. Users pay AR tokens to upload files that live forever on the permaweb. The most mature Arweave consumer product.
FVM (Filecoin Virtual Machine)
EVM-compatible smart-contract platform launched on Filecoin in March 2023. Made Filecoin programmable — DeFi for storage, perpetual storage clients, on-chain data DAOs.
Filecoin Saturn
Decentralized content delivery network for Filecoin. Operators run caching nodes that serve content with low latency, addressing Filecoin's historical retrieval slowness.
Walrus
Sui-native decentralized storage launched by Mysten Labs in 2024. Uses erasure coding ("Red Stuff" scheme) for cost efficiency. Tight integration with Sui smart contracts. WAL token (separate from SUI) pays for storage.
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)
Peer-to-peer content-addressed file distribution protocol launched 2015 by Protocol Labs. Not a blockchain and has no token. Provides content addressing (CIDs) that Filecoin and other networks use; durability requires a backing layer.
CID (Content Identifier)
IPFS's addressing primitive. A cryptographic hash of file content used as its identifier. Any node with matching content can serve it; the link does not break if any individual host goes offline.
Content addressing vs. location addressing
Traditional HTTP URLs point to a location (server + path); IPFS CIDs point to content (the file's hash). Content addressing is more durable because any node with the matching content can serve it.

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