Storage as DePIN: Filecoin & Arweave

What you'll learn

• Storage as the Original DePIN
• 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.