From the perspective of the storage track with a market capitalization potential of 5-10 billion for Warlus, how does CESS define the next generation storage paradigm?

The future of the storage track belongs to leaders who can integrate dynamic data processing with compliance innovation.

Written by: ChandlerZ

Recently, the storage sector has once again become the focus of the cryptocurrency market, with the Warlus project rapidly rising to prominence due to its innovative technical architecture and business model, becoming a hot topic among investors. The project is based on a modular narrative of “error-correcting code technology + low replication factor,” having secured $140 million in funding, with a latest valuation reaching $2 billion (FDV). Due to its strategic positioning within the Sui ecosystem, it is generally viewed positively by the market, with predictions of its market capitalization potentially hitting $5-10 billion. The emergence of Warlus not only reshapes the capital narrative of the storage sector but also reveals the immense potential contained within this field.

Warlus’s core advantage lies in its technological innovation, which significantly reduces storage costs. Compared to traditional solutions like Filecoin (with storage costs around 200 USD/TB/year), Warlus brings the cost down to 100 USD/TB/year, equivalent to 1/80 of the traditional solution. This groundbreaking cost-effectiveness has the potential to leverage the demand for trillion-dollar market scenarios such as AI training data and streaming content, thereby opening up enormous commercial space.

However, the current storage projects show a clear differentiation in technical routes. Filecoin focuses on cold storage, Arweave emphasizes permanent data archiving, and while Warlus has shown impressive innovation, its commercialization ability in high-frequency dynamic data processing has yet to be validated by the market. It is at this technological gap that CESS fills the market void with its positioning of “real-time interaction + enterprise-level storage.” More importantly, CESS is redefining its role as a data value infrastructure, transcending the boundaries of traditional storage tracks, and constructing an ecological system that integrates data storage, processing, exchange, and value realization, which is expected to become the next focal point of capital market attention.

1. Competitive Landscape of the Storage Track: A Major Test of Technical Path and Commercialization Capability

The storage sector is undergoing a period of rapid development. The changes on the demand side are particularly notable. On one hand, the demand for training data in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has surged dramatically, with an annual growth rate reaching 30%. This demand places higher requirements on storage technologies, especially in terms of performance and scalability when handling large-scale data. The widespread deployment of decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) devices is also intensifying the frequency of data exchange between storage devices, which further drives the upgrade of storage technology.

On the other hand, the policy environment has also provided favorable conditions for decentralized storage. In particular, the advancement of data privacy legislation in the US and Europe, including the promotion of laws such as GDPR and CCPA, has led to a strict distinction between data ownership and usage rights, as well as the standardized management of cross-border data flows, making the compliance advantages of decentralized storage increasingly prominent and a key factor in project competition.

Currently, mainstream projects in the storage track have their own focuses. Filecoin, as a pioneer, has built a vast storage network, but it is mainly suitable for cold data storage and has relatively weak real-time retrieval capabilities; Arweave focuses on permanent data storage, using block weaving technology to ensure data persistence, but the storage costs are high and it is not suitable for frequently updated dynamic data; Warlus significantly reduces storage costs through innovative error correction code technology, but its ecological development is still in the early stages.

In this competitive landscape, CESS is positioned in dynamic data storage and real-time interaction scenarios through technological innovation, filling the technical gaps of existing projects. It excels in basic storage performance and has also formed unique advantages in AI data processing and industry standardization, injecting new development momentum into the storage track.

2. The technical moat of CESS: Six innovations define the next-generation storage standard.

CESS, as a new generation decentralized storage network, fundamentally breaks through the limitations of traditional storage projects in its technical architecture design. Compared to projects like Filecoin, CESS has achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in several core technological dimensions.

First, CESS has innovatively achieved efficient storage and real-time retrieval of dynamic data. Imagine that if traditional blockchain storage systems like Filecoin are a large but slow-moving library, then CESS is like an efficient modern smart library that can not only store books but also query, update, and distribute content in real-time. The CD²N technology is the core engine of this revolution. It is like a neural network spread across the globe, when a user needs to access a file, the system can locate and transmit data in milliseconds (less than 50 milliseconds), which is over 40 times faster than Filecoin’s response time of over 2 seconds. This means that users can stream videos, conduct real-time transactions, or run applications that require frequent data interaction as smoothly as using centralized services, without experiencing noticeable delays.

The PoDR² multi-replica recoverable proof technology addresses the issue of data reliability in decentralized networks. CESS innovatively proposes the PoDR² (multi-replica recoverable proof) technology, which, through data sharding and encrypted storage, enables the system to automatically detect and repair damaged data replicas, enhancing data availability to 99.99% and effectively mitigating the single point of failure risk faced by Filecoin. This is akin to establishing a self-healing system for data. When a storage node fails or data is corrupted, CESS can quickly detect the problem and also automatically recover data from other healthy nodes, ensuring service continuity. It is like when a particular book in a library is damaged, the system can immediately retrieve the same book from another branch and repair the damaged one, ensuring that the reader’s experience is unaffected.

In terms of security and privacy protection, the proxy re-encryption technology (PReT) developed by CESS achieves precise separation of data ownership and usage rights, supports refined permission management, and meets the compliance requirements of strictly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. Like an advanced visitor management system, data owners can precisely control who can view which parts of the data, for how long, and can even revoke access permissions at any time. For example, a hospital can authorize research institutions to access de-identified patient data for research without worrying about data being copied or misused, as the system will automatically revoke access permissions after the pre-set research is completed.

The combination of TEE and zero-knowledge proof technology further enhances this security architecture. It is like processing data in a transparent, bulletproof glass room, where external observers can see that data is being processed but cannot see the specific content or obtain the original information. This technology combination has been applied in several medical institutions’ pathological data sharing projects, allowing sensitive medical data to be used for AI model training while protecting patient privacy, thus promoting advancements in medical research. By combining TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) and zero-knowledge proof technology, CESS has constructed a complete data privacy protection mechanism, particularly suitable for handling sensitive data in AI training, and this advantage has been validated in several medical institutions’ pathological data sharing projects.

In addition, CESS has also demonstrated unique advantages in developer ecosystem construction. Its storage resource pooling technology integrates idle devices from around the world, reducing the hardware threshold for mining machines by 70%, allowing for flexible configurations such as supporting 2TB+3TB mining machines to collaboratively store 5TB of files. With excellent compatibility based on the Substrate framework, CESS can seamlessly connect to the Polkadot ecosystem, supporting one-click deployment of multi-chain DApp storage solutions, significantly reducing the integration difficulty for developers.

Specifically, CESS supports the collaborative operation of multiple small-capacity devices. For example, a 2TB device and a 3TB device can work together to provide 5TB of storage service, significantly lowering the participation threshold. This flexibility allows idle storage resources worldwide to be effectively integrated, forming a truly decentralized global storage network.

At the same time, CESS is developed based on the Substrate framework, and its seamless compatibility with the Polkadot ecosystem allows developers to easily integrate the storage services provided by CESS. For developers, this is like having a plug-and-play storage module that adds high-performance, secure, and reliable storage capabilities to their applications without needing to delve into the underlying technical details.

3. Capital Potential and Ecological Outburst

CESS is backed by a strong team and capital support. The core team members come from cloud computing giants such as AWS and Alibaba Cloud, possessing rich experience in distributed systems and storage technology, as well as 6 years of Substrate development experience. They have won the Polkadot hackathon championship and received W3F Grant certification, demonstrating their undeniable technical strength.

In addition, the DeShare public beta airdrop event recently launched by CESS has achieved remarkable results, with a single event starting in March exceeding 600,000 users. This number is particularly impressive in the current market environment, showcasing CESS’s strong user base and ecological vitality. While expanding the project’s user group, the event has also accumulated a large number of potential users for commercial applications after the mainnet launch in the future. More notably, CESS plans to issue tokens and launch the mainnet in the second quarter of this year, which will be an important milestone in the project’s development. With the mainnet launch, CESS is expected to initiate a million-level developer incentive program, further promoting the expansion of storage nodes and ecological construction, which is likely to become a key catalyst for driving rapid growth in the project’s market value.

In October 2024, CESS was invited to showcase its technological strength to members of the U.S. Congress, competing alongside Filecoin and establishing a benchmark position in policy compliance. In April of this year, CESS was again invited to Capitol Hill for technical sharing and demonstrations, fully proving its influence and recognition on the international stage. This high-level policy interaction has established a first-mover advantage for CESS in terms of compliance, especially against the backdrop of increasingly stringent global crypto regulations, where compliance will become one of the key factors for the success or failure of projects. CESS’s active layout in this regard undoubtedly lays a solid foundation for its future global development.

4. Paradigm Revolutionaries of the Storage Track

The technical architecture of CESS precisely fills the current technological gap in the storage sector. Filecoin focuses on cold data storage, Arweave is dedicated to permanent data archiving, and Warlus emphasizes reducing storage costs, while CESS can meet the rigid demands of emerging application scenarios such as AI and DePIN with its real-time data processing capabilities. This differentiated positioning gives CESS a unique advantage in the competitive landscape and is expected to lead the next paradigm shift in storage technology.

As blockchain applications expand from financial transactions to a wider range of fields, the need for storage systems is shifting from simple data preservation to complex data value networks. The technical architecture of CESS is in line with this trend, with its real-time interaction capabilities, security and privacy protections, and developer-friendly ecosystem to build a comprehensive data value network, not just a decentralized “hard disk”.

CESS’s vision goes far beyond being a storage service provider to create a complete network of data value. In this network, data can be stored securely and used effectively to create more value. This upgrade from storage hard drives to data value networks will propel Web3 into the era of large-scale business applications.

Summary

The storage track, as a core component of blockchain infrastructure, is becoming increasingly important with the enrichment of Web3 application scenarios. CESS, with its innovative technologies in dynamic data storage, security and privacy protection, and developer ecology, is defining the next generation of storage paradigms. Its core technologies, which have been realized while traditional projects like Filecoin have not, such as millisecond-level retrieval capabilities, automatic data repair, and refined permission management, provide a competitive advantage for CESS.

With CESS set to launch its token and mainnet in the second quarter, the project is expected to experience explosive growth. Leveraging technology stacking and ecological positioning, CESS is upgrading from an infrastructure provider to a data value network operator. Its commercialization capability and capital density may make it the next ten billion dollar Web3 super protocol after Warlus.

The future of the storage track belongs to leaders who can integrate dynamic data processing with Compliance innovation, and CESS is undoubtedly at the forefront of this path. More importantly, CESS has transcended the mere storage track and is building a comprehensive data value infrastructure, which is a data value-driven engine capable of empowering the entire Web3 ecosystem, thereby redefining the flow, processing, and value realization mechanisms of data in the on-chain world.