According to a new report published by Singaporean venture capital firm Foresight Ventures, the cost of decentralized file storage on blockchains like Filecoin, Arweave, Swarm, StorJ, and Sia currently ranges from almost 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-$23 per TB of monthly storage.
However, The report also notes other costs associated with decentralized storage, such as data upload and recovery fees, which can run as high as $7 per TB. Some service providers mentioned in the report, such as Filecoin, only had storage fees, which were also quite low, while others had all three types of fees mentioned.
Besides, Foresight analysts wrote that blockchain storage still faces problems such as “file loss”, “difficult-to-retrieve data” and “high bandwidth requirements”.. Pointing to a blockchain, the researchers commented:
“The price does not take into account the bandwidth. Some nodes only provide storage services, they refuse recovery.”
Despite the 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 rose 2% year-on-year to reach 17 million. terabytes (TB) by the end of 2022. Filecoin currently has the largest market share at 67%, followed by Arweave (19%), Sia (8%), and Storj (6%). While network utilization remains relatively low, the metric among the top players has since risen to 3.1%, compared to just 0.2% in 2021.
On April 27, Filecoin released the nv19 Lightening and nv20 Thunder network updates to improve block validation times. In April, the network had 22.7 million TB of storage capacity and 3,623 storage provider systems.
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