From the perspective of the 50-100 billion market capitalization potential of Warlus, how does CESS define the next generation storage paradigm?

The future of the storage track belongs to leaders who can integrate dynamic data processing with Compliance innovation.

Written by: ChandlerZ

Recently, the storage sector has once again become the focus of the cryptocurrency market. The Warlus project has rapidly risen to prominence among investors due to its innovative technical architecture and business model. This project, based on a modular narrative of “error correction code technology + low replication factor,” has secured $140 million in financing, with its latest valuation reaching $2 billion (FDV). Its strategic positioning within the Sui ecosystem has led to widespread market optimism, with predictions that its market capitalization could reach between $5 billion and $10 billion. The emergence of Warlus not only reshapes the capital narrative of the storage sector but also reveals the enormous potential inherent in this field.

Warlus’s core advantage lies in its technological innovation, which significantly reduces storage costs. Compared to traditional solutions like Filecoin (storage costs around $200/TB/year), Warlus brings the cost down to $100/TB/year, equivalent to 1/80 of traditional solutions. This breakthrough in cost-effectiveness has the potential to leverage the demand for trillion-dollar market scenarios such as AI training data and streaming content, thereby opening up vast business opportunities.

However, the current storage projects show a clear divergence in technical routes. Filecoin focuses on cold storage, Arweave specializes in permanent data archiving, and while Warlus performs well in technological innovation, its commercialization capability in high-frequency dynamic data processing has yet to be validated by the market. It is precisely at this technological gap that CESS fills the market void with its positioning of “real-time interaction + enterprise-level storage.” More importantly, CESS is redefining itself as a data value infrastructure, surpassing the boundaries of traditional storage tracks, and building an infrastructure ecosystem that integrates data storage, processing, exchange, and value realization, which is expected to become the next focal point of interest in the capital market.

1. Storage Track Competitive Landscape: A Test of Technical Path and Commercialization Capability

The storage sector is experiencing a rapid development period. The changes on the demand side are particularly significant. On one hand, the demand for training data in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has surged dramatically, with an annual growth rate of 30%. This demand places higher requirements on storage technology, especially in terms of performance and scalability when handling large-scale data. The widespread deployment of decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) devices is also intensifying the frequency of data interaction between storage devices, further driving the upgrade of storage technology.

On the other hand, the policy environment has also provided favorable conditions for decentralized storage. In particular, the successive promotion of data privacy legislation in the US and Europe, including the advancement of laws such as GDPR and CCPA, has led to a strict distinction between data ownership and usage rights, as well as the standardized management of cross-border data flows. This has made the compliance advantages of decentralized storage increasingly prominent, becoming a key factor in the competition among projects.

Currently, mainstream projects in the storage track have their own focuses. Filecoin, as a pioneer, has built a vast storage network, but it is mainly suitable for cold data storage and has weak real-time retrieval capabilities; Arweave focuses on the permanent storage of data, using block-weaving technology to ensure the persistence of data, but the storage costs are relatively high and it is not suitable for frequently updated dynamic data; Warlus relies on innovative error correction code technology to significantly reduce storage costs, but its ecosystem construction is still in the early stages.

In this competitive landscape, CESS positions itself through technological innovation in dynamic data storage and real-time interaction scenarios, filling the technical gaps of existing projects. It performs excellently in basic storage performance and also establishes unique advantages in AI data processing and industry standardization, injecting new development momentum into the storage sector.

2. The Technical Moat of CESS: Six Innovations Defining the Next Generation Storage Standard

CESS, as a new generation decentralized storage network, fundamentally breaks through the limitations of traditional storage projects with its technical architecture design. Compared to projects like Filecoin, CESS has achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in several core technological dimensions.

First, CESS has pioneeringly achieved efficient storage and real-time retrieval of dynamic data. Imagine that if traditional blockchain storage systems like Filecoin are a large but slowly moving library, then CESS is like an efficient modern smart library that can store books and also query, update, and distribute content in real-time. The CD²N technology is the core engine of this revolution. It functions like a global neural network, allowing the system to locate and transmit data in milliseconds (under 50 milliseconds) when a user needs to access a certain file, which is over 40 times faster than Filecoin’s response time of over 2 seconds. This means users can stream videos, conduct real-time transactions, or run applications requiring frequent data interaction as smoothly as using centralized services, without experiencing significant delays.

The PoDR² multi-copy recoverable proof technology addresses the data reliability issues in decentralized networks. CESS innovatively proposes the PoDR² (multi-copy recoverable proof) technology, which, through data sharding and encrypted storage, allows the system to automatically detect and repair damaged data copies, enhancing data availability to 99.99% and effectively solving the single point of failure risk faced by Filecoin. This is akin to establishing a self-healing system for data. When a storage node fails or data gets corrupted, CESS can quickly detect the problem and automatically recover data from other healthy nodes, ensuring service continuity. It is like when a specific book in a library is damaged, the system can immediately retrieve the same book from other branches and repair the damaged one, ensuring that the reader’s experience is unaffected.

In terms of security and privacy protection, the proxy re-encryption technology (PReT) developed by CESS achieves a precise separation of data ownership and usage rights, supporting fine-grained permission management and meeting the compliance requirements of strictly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. Like an advanced visitor management system, data owners can precisely control who can view which parts of the data, for how long, and can revoke access at any time. For example, a hospital can authorize a research institution to access de-identified patient data for research, without worrying about the data being copied or misused, as the system will automatically revoke access after the preset research is completed.

The combination of TEE and zero-knowledge proof technology further enhances this security architecture. It’s like processing data in a transparent, bulletproof glass room where external observers can see that data is being processed but cannot see the specific content or access the raw information. This technological combination has already been applied in pathology data sharing projects at several medical institutions, allowing sensitive medical data to be used for AI model training while protecting patient privacy, thereby advancing medical research. By integrating TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) and zero-knowledge proof technology, CESS has established a complete data privacy protection mechanism, particularly suited for handling sensitive data in AI training, a benefit that has been validated in multiple pathology data sharing projects at various medical institutions.

In addition, CESS has also demonstrated unique advantages in the development of the developer ecosystem. Its storage resource pooling technology integrates idle devices from around the world, reducing the hardware threshold for mining machines by 70%, and achieving flexible configurations such as supporting 2TB + 3TB mining machines to collaboratively store 5TB files. With the good compatibility of the Substrate framework, CESS can seamlessly connect to the Polkadot ecosystem, supporting one-click deployment of multi-chain DApp storage solutions, significantly reducing the integration difficulty for developers.

Specifically, CESS allows multiple low-capacity devices to work together, such as a 2TB device and a 3TB device that can provide 5TB of storage together, significantly lowering the barrier to entry. This flexibility allows idle storage resources around the world to be effectively consolidated to form a truly decentralized global storage network.

At the same time, CESS is developed based on the Substrate framework, and its seamless compatibility with the Polkadot ecosystem allows developers to easily integrate the storage services provided by CESS. For developers, this is like obtaining a plug-and-play storage module, enabling them to add high-performance and secure storage functionalities to their applications without needing to delve into the underlying technical details.

3. Capital Potential and Ecological Explosion

CESS is backed by a strong team and capital support. The core team members come from cloud computing giants like AWS and Alibaba Cloud, possessing rich experience in distributed systems and storage technology, as well as 6 years of Substrate development experience. They have won the Polkadot Hackathon championship and received W3F Grant certification, demonstrating undeniable technical strength.

In addition, CESS’s recent DeShare public beta points airdrop campaign has achieved remarkable results, with a single event starting in March alone exceeding 600,000 users, which is particularly impressive in the current market environment, demonstrating the strong user base and ecological vitality of CESS. The campaign not only expanded the project’s user base, but also accumulated a large number of potential users for future commercial applications after the mainnet launch. What’s more noteworthy is that CESS plans to issue coins and launch the mainnet in the second quarter of this year, which will be an important milestone in the development of the project. With the launch of the mainnet, CESS is expected to launch a million-level developer incentive program to further promote the expansion of storage nodes and the construction of the ecosystem, which is likely to be a key catalyst for the rapid growth of the project’s market capitalization.

In October 2024, CESS was invited to showcase its technological prowess to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, competing alongside Filecoin and establishing itself as a benchmark in policy Compliance. In April of this year, CESS was invited again to Capitol Hill for technical sharing and demonstration, fully proving its influence and recognition on the international stage. This high-level policy interaction has given CESS a first-mover advantage in terms of Compliance, especially against the backdrop of increasingly strict global cryptocurrency regulations, where Compliance will be one of the key factors for the success or failure of projects. CESS’s proactive layout in this regard undoubtedly lays a solid foundation for its future global development.

4. Paradigm Revolutionaries in the Storage Track

The technical architecture of CESS precisely fills the current technological gap in the storage sector. Filecoin focuses on cold data storage, Arweave is dedicated to permanent data archiving, and Warlus emphasizes reducing storage costs, while CESS can meet the rigid demands of emerging application scenarios such as AI and DePIN with its real-time data processing capabilities. This differentiated positioning gives CESS a unique advantage in the competitive landscape, with the potential to lead the next generation paradigm revolution in storage technology.

As blockchain applications expand from financial transactions to broader fields, the demand for storage systems is shifting from simple data preservation to complex data value networks. The technical architecture of CESS perfectly aligns with this trend, with its real-time interaction capabilities, security and privacy protection, and developer-friendly ecosystem, together constructing a comprehensive data value network rather than just a decentralized “hard drive.”

The vision of CESS goes far beyond just becoming a storage service provider; it aims to create a complete data value network. In this network, data can be stored securely and utilized effectively to generate more value. This upgrade from storage disks to a data value network will drive Web3 into the era of large-scale commercial applications.

Summary

The storage track, as a core component of blockchain infrastructure, is becoming increasingly prominent with the richness of Web3 application scenarios. CESS is defining the next generation of storage paradigms with its innovative technologies in dynamic data storage, security and privacy protection, and developer ecosystem. Its core technologies, such as millisecond-level retrieval capability, automatic data repair, and refined permission management, which traditional projects like Filecoin have not yet achieved, provide a competitive advantage for CESS.

With CESS about to issue tokens and launch its mainnet in the second quarter, the project is expected to experience explosive growth. Relying on technology stacking and ecological positioning, CESS is upgrading from an infrastructure provider to a data value network operator. Its commercialization capabilities and capital density may make it the next hundred billion dollar Web3 super protocol after Warlus.

The future of the storage track belongs to leaders who can integrate dynamic data processing with Compliance innovation, and CESS is undoubtedly at the forefront of this path. More importantly, CESS has gone beyond merely the storage track and is building a comprehensive data value infrastructure, which is a data value-driven engine that can empower the entire Web3 ecosystem, thereby redefining the flow, processing, and value realization mechanisms of data in the on-chain world.