Regarding decentralized storage, there is a deeply ingrained obsession in the market: paying a one-time fee for permanent preservation rights. But does this logic stand up to scrutiny?

From a cost perspective, asking users to pay cash for 200 years of storage is often an overkill. Think about those DeFi audit records, social media snapshots, AI training data—do they really need to accompany human civilization until the end? Clearly not.

Some projects have thought of more practical solutions: flexible leasing models, similar to cloud service providers. Users can choose periods like 1 year, 5 years, and pay accordingly. The result? Short-term storage costs can be reduced to just 1% of traditional solutions, making the cost advantage obvious. Plus, extending storage later is simple—just pay the renewal fee.

This difference reflects two distinct business logics. One emphasizes eternity and sentimentality, while the other returns to the core question: how long is my data truly worth storing? Paying for active data, rather than for an extended lifecycle—that's the realistic choice in the era of high-frequency, massive data. Decentralized storage shouldn't be limited to a single approach; diverse solutions just fill the market gap.