Blockchain
According to a new report published by Singaporean venture capital firm Foresight Ventures, the cost of decentralized file storage on blockchains such as Filecoin, Arweave, Swarm, StorJ and Sia currently ranges from nearly zero to $4 per terabyte (TB) per month. This is much lower than traditional Web2 services like Amazon Cloud or Microsoft Azure, where prices can range from $16 to $23 per TB of monthly storage.
However, the report also outlined other costs associated with decentralized storage, such as data upload and retrieval costs, the latter of which can be as high as $7 per TB. Some of the service providers mentioned in the report, such as Filecoin, only had storage costs, which were also quite low, while others had all three types of costs mentioned above.
In addition, Foresight analysts wrote that blockchain storage continues to face issues such as file loss, hard-to-retrieve data, and high bandwidth requirements. Referring to one blockchain, researchers noted:
Price does not take bandwidth into account. Some nodes only provide storage services, refuse retrieval.
Despite pricing controversies, data from blockchain analytics firm Messari cited in the report shows that the total storage capacity of the four largest file storage blockchains increased 2% year over year to 17 million terabytes (TB) by the end of the year. 2022. Filecoin currently has the largest market share with 67%, followed by Arweave (19%), Sia (8%) and Storj (6%). While network usage remains relatively low, the benchmark among the top players has since risen to 3.1%, compared to just 0.2% in 2021.
On April 27, Filecoin rolled out nv19 Lightening and nv20 Thunder network upgrades to improve block validation times. As of April, the network has 22.7 million TB of storage capacity and 3,623 systems from storage providers.
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