A new report by Singaporean venture capital firm Foresight Ventures reveals that the cost of decentralized file storage on blockchain networks like Filecoin, Arweave, Swarm, StorJ, and Sia can vary greatly, ranging from near zero to $4 per terabyte per month. While this is significantly lower than traditional Web2 services like Amazon Cloud and Microsoft Azure that charge $16 to $23 per TB per month, there are other costs associated with decentralized storage such as data upload and retrieval fees, which can be as high as $7 per TB.
Furthermore, the report highlights several issues with blockchain storage, such as file loss, difficulties in retrieving data, and high bandwidth requirements. Foresight analysts also pointed out that some nodes only offer storage services and refuse to retrieve data. The report reveals that the total storage capacity of the four major file-storage blockchains increased by 2% year-over-year to 17 million TB by the end of 2022, as per data from Messari, a blockchain analytics firm. Despite concerns, Filecoin dominates the market share with 67%, followed by Arweave with 19%, Sia with 8%, and Storj with 6%. Network utilization has also surged among top players, reaching 3.1% compared to just 0.2% in 2021.
Filecoin executed the nv19 Lightening and nv20 Thunder network enhancements on April 27th to enhance block validation speed. As of now, the network comprises 3,623 storage provider systems and has a storage capacity of 22.7 million TB.
