In the comment area of ​​recent articles, many readers mentioned Filecoin and Arweave.

Over the past few years, although I have shared my thoughts on these two projects from time to time, every once in a while, readers will always ask about these two projects again,

In the DePIN track, these two projects are currently the best-implemented and continue to make progress, and the field of decentralized storage in which they are located has always been regarded as an indispensable core sector in the encryption world.

Among these two projects, the first one I participated in was Filecoin. But in the last bull market I liquidated all my positions.

There are two fundamental reasons:

First, after the project was launched, I found that the functions it implemented did not form a clear advantage over its biggest centralized competitors (various "clouds").

Second, in the process of tracking the project, I think the project party was reluctant to deal with some technical issues. This reluctance does not stem from the attitude of the project party, but is more likely to be a limitation of current technical means or a possible problem with the business model itself.

Therefore, I felt that if this project continued to follow this model, its future development would be worrying, so I threw it away without hesitation.

After leaving Filecoin, I participated in Arweave, which is the only decentralized storage project I have participated in since then.

What attracts me most about this project is that the "permanent storage" it implements is unprecedented in previous storage solutions, and it is the first such project.

However, after participating, I found that its application and promotion are also very difficult. Although many projects (such as NFT) use it to store data (such as pictures), and some centralized giants (such as Google) have cooperated closely with it, in general, the usage scenarios of the project are still very limited. The market is not open.

However, I have always believed that permanent storage is a rigid need, and it is the only one in this field. In addition, I saw that the team has been persisting over the years, so I chose to keep this project and invest in the bear market.

The development of both Filecoin and Arweave projects has not been smooth in recent years, but the two teams have been trying to make breakthroughs and innovations.

Filecoin’s biggest move is the development of a virtual machine that allows users to run smart contracts directly in its system and is compatible with Ethereum.

When I first saw this news a few years ago, I was quite disappointed. Such a large project has been held back for so long only to come up with such an old-fashioned and outdated plan. This is really unworthy of the reputation and influence of this team. It makes me wonder whether the team has "exhausted its talent" in terms of innovation capabilities.

We already have countless EVMs, do we need a new EVM? I even think that doing this EVM is not as good as crossing the track into a storage-focused modular blockchain like Celestia. In this regard, it has more advantages than Celestia.

This year, I finally saw Arweave’s innovation initiatives: the team launched AO, a comprehensive platform based on Arweave.

Regarding AO, I shared some of its technical details with you in a Twitter exchange in March. Overall, the framework it envisions is very large, and the functions it wants to implement are also very strong. In theory, it can become a basic platform for hosting AI applications.

But if we delve into its white paper, we will find that there are many technical details that need to be discussed, and many implementation paths need to be verified.

I even doubt whether it is really applicable to simply apply staking penalties to prevent several types of nodes in AO from doing evil? If this method could be applied so easily, DePIN and decentralized AI would have been implemented long ago.

In short, AO's future road is also extremely difficult and dangerous.

But generally speaking, the idea of ​​the Arweave team is logically closely related to the existing business, and it is a very consistent extension in terms of technical ideas, and the idea is very bold.

This innovation is much better than the virtual machine launched by Filecoin.

Some readers asked whether it is appropriate to replace Filecoin with Arweave now.

I will consider this issue in two steps:

The first step is to sell Filecoin?

The second step, do you want to buy Arweave?

If it were me, I would take the first step without hesitation and liquidate Filecoin immediately.

But whether the second step is suitable depends on its price and potential space.

I checked the trend of Arweave. From the beginning of February to now, it has increased four times, from $8 to the current $43. This price is less than 1 times the peak of the previous bull market at $83.

If you buy Arweave under this situation, what are the potential future profits? If it were me, I wouldn't buy it now.