Arweave or Filecoin? Here’s the clear winner of decentralized storage war

The ‘decentralized storage’ war has continued to wage on over the years as more developments around this space came to life. Many teams like Filecoin, Storj, Sia, began building open source solutions in late 2016 and early 2017 after recognizing the latent opportunity.

Incidentally, in 2018, another decentralized storage space Arweave jumped onto the bandwagon. It launched a mainnet with the purpose of ‘permanent storage.’ Gradually, the competition between Arweave and Filecoin took the center stage.

But are two contenders ready to battle? 

Both Filecoin and Arweave enable decentralized, trust-minimized, censorship-resistant data storage for long periods. Either for archival purposes or real-time applications like website hosting. At first glance, both of these look pretty similar.

However, it’s important to note that Filecoin’s economic model mirrors that of centralized cloud providers: contract-based storage. Arweave, on the other hand, introduced an entirely new economic model to the market. One that was never possible before the advent of permission-less crypto networks: permanent storage.

Arweave charges a single fee for storing data indefinitely, whereas other protocols keep it as long as the users pay for it.
It took the flagship protocol three years to go from 0 TB to 10 TB of stored data, but over the past six months, the amount of data stored grew by more than 40 TB.

Source: Tokenterminal

On the other hand, Filecoin was able to attract significant storage capacity as well. According to Messari’s, 30 March report, Filecoin’s committed storage capacity hiked steadily to over 16,000 PiB. This was ‘equivalent to approximately 65,000 copies of Wikipedia or 1,600 Netflix movie archives as of March 2022,’ the report added.

The network capacity comes from over 3,900 decentralized storage providers distributed around the globe.

Source: Messari

Well, for context, 1 Terabyte (TB) = 0.00088 Pebibyte (PiB).

In addition to this, the former protocol’s valuation relative to the fee revenue certainly stood out. At press time, it witnessed 3,000x growth. This was relatively high compared to other projects listed on Token Terminal.

The graph below showcased Arweave’s price-to-sales ratio, its fully diluted market cap divided by annualized fee revenue.

Source: Tokenterminal

This could also highlight a bullish case,

“The high multiple could be interpreted as investors expecting significant (fee revenue) growth for Arweave in the near to mid-term future, so they’re comfortable paying a slight premium today.”

The native token, AR indeed enjoyed this bullish sentiment. As per CoinMarketCap, the token surged by 5% in just 24 hours. At press time, it was trading above the $40 mark.