Analyst Stu L., from the Altcoin Buzz team, pointed to an 800 percent increase for the two cryptocurrencies serving in decentralized storage. Here are the details…
Why is decentralized storage important?
One of the first applications built on blockchain was decentralized file storage. Hence, P2P file storage is already popular among many experts. This was a natural extension of the idea of centralizing everything. There are altcoins going back to 2014 and 2015 like Filecoin and Storj. IPFS secures NFTs in most markets. Others like SIA and more recently Arweave have popped up.
Each has its own way of working, uses Blockchain and provides benefits for its coin. There are many competitors in the market. But recently, decentralized storage has become the leadership race. According to the analyst, Filecoin (FIL) and Arweave (AR) stand out in this respect.
The first altcoin that the analyst drew attention to: Filecoin
Filecoin is one of the oldest projects in crypto. It allows you to store data cheaply. It also uses IPFS. You can also provide extra storage and get paid for it. You earn a fee, all in native FIL coin. You can also create, store and run your own dApps on Filecoin. But first, you should know that your data is not permanent. If you don’t pay for your storage, they can delete the data. So it’s not permanent like Arweave.
It’s more like Dropbox, but instead of Dropbox controlling the servers, Filecoin can shut down your data. On the other hand, most of the Filecoin miners (data storage suppliers) are from China. This can be seen as a major concern for businesses in the West. Still, the demand for Filecoin storage appears to be growing rapidly. Especially among scientific and research-intensive projects. Big breaking news now. Filecoin’s Virtual Machine or FVM. This FVM launch on March 14 means that Ethereum smart contract functionality has come to Filecoin.
Importance of FVM
According to analysts, with FVM, privacy-based L2s, different types of rollups for scaling and speed, low fees will be available. Also, according to the analyst, programmability is very important. Currently, FVM also provides:
- Liquid staking.
- DataDAOs used to create and work around specific datasets.
- Persistent storage that it didn’t have before.
According to the analyst, this is a huge event. Alongside this big FVM news, we’re seeing a lot of fundamentals increase, such as revenue, fees, and developer activity.
Second altcoin on the list: Arweave (AR)
Arweave is a persistent web storage solution. It offers storage for the web3 world. The network processed 20 percent more transactions in February than in January. January was also a month with record transactions. More than 70 million transactions took place in February alone. Along with Polygon, Arweave provides storage for Meta to bring NFTs to Instagram. This was huge news for Polygon and huge for Arweave.
ArDrive, also Dropbox for Web3, now lets you save files of 100kb or less for free. So this is really like Dropbox or Google Drive. It also has a growing ecosystem as follows:
- Warp Contracts for “data-driven” smart contracts on Arweave.
- EverVision for Web3 infrastructure tools.
- HollowDB to offer privacy using zero-knowledge evidence.
- Bundlr as a data layer for developers and more.
In addition, Forward Research does R&D for Arweave. For Arweave, they found a way to turn any phone or offline device into a secure hardware wallet. Even Ledger suffered a data leak once. Such practical applications help you demonstrate that Arweave is much more than a decentralized Dropbox.