You may have heard many projects claiming that they have achieved decentralization by using IPFS or Arweave, but honestly, such claims are riddled with flaws.

What is the reality? IPFS nodes can go offline at any time, and your files can just disappear; Arweave, although touting permanent storage, charges exorbitant fees that are far from suitable for frequent updates; and most painfully, to save effort, the majority of projects rely on centralized gateways like Pinata for access—if these services fail, the front end is directly doomed. Is this still called decentralization? It’s just centralized systems with a different disguise.

To truly achieve decentralized storage, I believe there are three essential conditions: high availability, low cost, and on-chain verifiability. Currently, in the Sui ecosystem, there are not many options that meet all three.

For example, the Red Stuff encoding system can automatically recover data under extreme failures; FROST micro-payments support billing per KB, which is a real necessity for high-frequency interactions; more importantly, each file on the Sui chain is an independent object, and smart contracts can directly verify its integrity, completely bypassing third-party intermediaries. The reason why users can smoothly stream 4K video NFTs on Flatlander is that the data is hosted by this system, verified through on-chain hash checks. This isn’t just visual decentralization, but a guarantee at the mathematical level.

From a developer’s perspective, choosing a storage solution is essentially a trust decision. If you tell users "your assets belong to you," you must ensure that not even the last image can disappear out of thin air. Don’t be fooled by those “pseudo-decentralization” propaganda; a true Web3 application should be trustworthy from the very first line of code and the first piece of data. That’s what blockchain should look like.