The promise of owning and managing one’s own data is revolutionary, creating increasing interest in Web3 platforms and applications. For instance, recent findings show that the Web3 market was estimated to be worth around $2.9 billion last year, yet this number is expected to reach $23.3 billion by 2028. Web3 is also capturing the interest of venture capitalists, as Cointelegraph Research found this sector to be the most sought-after investment deal in 2022.
The rise of Web3 has also resulted in the need for decentralized storage solutions, which will ultimately allow users to archive, retrieve and maintain their own data. Findings from Huobi Research Institute further show that increasing global storage data volume will elevate the cost of security and high power consumption, which will fuel the trend toward decentralized storage. The report states, “World storage system demand has progressed from remote storage to instant cloud storage, and now blockchain decentralized storage which we shall call Web3 storage.”
Breaking down decentralized storage
In order to better understand the potential behind decentralized storage, it’s important to explain what these solutions provide and how they differ from centralized platforms. Marta Belcher, president and chair of the Filecoin Foundation — the organization facilitating governance of the Filecoin network — told Cointelegraph that decentralized systems offer an alternative to centralized systems for storing data and making websites available. She said:
“Today’s internet is centralized — right now, the majority of data making up the many websites we use every day sits in data warehouses owned by just three companies: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. We have often seen these companies suffer blackouts, and swaths of the Web go down for hours — that’s the problem with having single points of failure.”
With these challenges in mind, Belcher explained that decentralized storage providers like Filecoin are capable of creating a better version of the Web by combining the storage capacity and computing power of many individual devices into a supercomputer-like network that can store multiple copies of data. “On this decentralized version of the internet, websites stay up even if some nodes fail, and the availability of information is not dependent on any one server or company,” she said.
To facilitate this, Belcher explained that Filecoin uses a programmable money…
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