I've been paying attention to Web3 infrastructure for a while, and decentralized storage has always been my key research area. After all, data is the true underlying support for all applications.

The reality is—most storage projects I've encountered before are stuck on two issues. Either the costs are too high, making it unaffordable for users and small projects; or pursuing speed and usability means compromising on security. After looking into it, I always felt there was a missing piece, a true balance that hadn't been found.

Until I carefully studied an emerging storage protocol and thoroughly dissected its technical architecture and economic model. Only then did I realize—the core of decentralized storage isn't about whether it can be done, but whether it can be done cheaply and practically.

What moved me the most was its Red Stuff erasure coding technology. Many decentralized storage projects, to ensure security, usually set the replication factor above 10. This makes storage costs several times higher than centralized cloud services, completely lacking competitiveness.

This project takes a different approach—it doesn't simply pile up data copies, but employs a smarter method. It splits data into primary and secondary shards, distributed across nodes in the network. The replication factor is reduced to 4-5, bringing costs roughly in line with centralized solutions. The key is, this method doesn't sacrifice security; even if two-thirds of the nodes fail, the remaining shards can quickly restore data integrity.

This is what I call truly implementable decentralized storage—not using high costs to create a sense of decentralization, but leveraging more sophisticated technical design to unify cost and security. Once costs are lowered, large-scale applications become genuinely feasible.