DEV Community: Vrushali sontakke

Filecoin vs Arweave vs Walrus: Which Decentralised Storage Protocol Should You Use?

Vrushali sontakke — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:17:44 +0000

Why decentralised storage matters right now

As Web3 applications multiply and AI-generated content floods the web, the question of where data actually lives has never been more urgent. Centralised cloud providers (Amazon S3, Google Cloud, Azure) control an uncomfortable amount of the world's data. That creates single points of failure, censorship risks, and vendor lock-in that directly contradicts the promise of a decentralised web.

For developers building dApps, NFT platforms, archival tools, and on-chain applications, choosing the right storage layer is not an afterthought. It is infrastructure strategy.

The problem with centralised storage

When Cloudflare goes down, large parts of the internet go dark. When Amazon S3 has an outage, apps from Netflix to Reddit buckle. This fragility is baked into the centralised model: your data lives on servers owned by a corporation that can throttle it, censor it, price-gouge you for it, or simply lose it.

For Web3, the stakes are higher. NFT metadata stored on AWS has already "disappeared" when companies shut down, rendering digital assets worthless. Smart contracts that point to off-chain data via centralised URLs are only as permanent as the company hosting that URL. The whole premise of decentralisation falls apart if your immutable on-chain record points to a mutable, deletable, AWS-hosted file.

Decentralised storage protocols solve this by distributing data across a network of independent nodes, removing any single entity's control. But not all decentralised storage is built the same. Picking the wrong one for your use case can be an expensive mistake.

The protocols, one by one

Filecoin: the marketplace giant

What it does: Filecoin is a decentralised marketplace for storage. Rather than building a proprietary storage network from scratch, Filecoin created a protocol that lets anyone with spare hard drive space rent it out and get paid in FIL tokens. The result is the largest decentralised storage network in the world by raw capacity.

How it works: Storage providers (miners) offer their disk space to the network. Clients pay FIL to store data, and miners are cryptographically required to prove they're actually storing it over time, through mechanisms called Proof of Replication (PoRep) and Proof of Spacetime (PoSt). This makes storage verifiable, not just trustworthy.

Best for: Developers and enterprises dealing with massive cold datasets. Think genomics archives, film studios backing up raw footage, or Web3 projects that need cost-effective bulk storage. Filecoin excels when you need to store large volumes cheaply and retrieval speed is not a priority.

Key weakness: Filecoin has struggled with token economics. The FIL token has seen significant price volatility, and storage provider incentives have not always aligned with network growth. Retrieval speeds are also slow compared to traditional cloud, making it a poor fit for hot data or user-facing applications.

Arweave: the permanent archive

What it does: Arweave is built around a single idea: pay once, store forever. Unlike Filecoin's ongoing rental model, Arweave uses a one-time upfront payment to fund permanent, immutable storage. Once your data is on Arweave, it cannot be deleted or altered. Ever.

How it works: When you pay to upload data, a portion of that payment goes into a financial endowment. The interest generated from this endowment incentivises miners to keep storing your data indefinitely, even centuries from now. This is backed by the "blockweave," a structure where each new block also stores a random previous block, gradually replicating data across the network.

Best for: Archivists, journalists, NFT projects, and anyone who needs verifiable, tamper-proof permanence. Arweave is the protocol of choice for storing NFT metadata, on-chain governance records, historical website snapshots, and scientific data that must never be altered. It has been live since 2018, giving it a track record no other decentralised storage protocol can match.

Key weakness: The upfront cost can be significant, especially for large files or collections, and it's paid all at once, not spread over time. More critically, Arweave is optimised for write-once, read-occasionally data. Retrieval speeds are slow, and the network is not designed for high-frequency access. If your app needs to fetch data fast and often, Arweave will frustrate your users.

Walrus: the new contender built for speed

What it does: Walrus is the newest protocol in this comparison and takes a fundamentally different design philosophy. Rather than competing with Filecoin on cold storage capacity or with Arweave on permanence, Walrus is purpose-built for hot data: files that need to be stored reliably and retrieved fast.

How it works: Built on the Sui blockchain, Walrus is optimised for speed and high-throughput access. It uses erasure coding, a technique that splits files into chunks and distributes them redundantly across nodes, allowing reconstruction even if some nodes go offline. The result is a decentralised storage network that behaves more like a CDN than a traditional blockchain archive.

Best for: App developers who need decentralised storage without sacrificing user experience. Web3 gaming assets, media files served directly in dApps, or any application where storage is a live, active part of the product, not just a backup layer. Walrus is the answer for builders who previously had no choice but to fall back on AWS because nothing decentralised was fast enough.

Key weakness: Walrus is new. Being backed by the Sui ecosystem gives it resources and credibility, but it has not been tested at the scale Filecoin and Arweave have. Its focus on hot data also means it is not the right choice for permanent archival storage. Data on Walrus is not guaranteed to persist indefinitely the way Arweave's model promises. Builders considering Walrus for production need to accept some early-adopter risk.

Side-by-side comparison

	Filecoin	Arweave	Walrus
Core function	Marketplace for renting storage space	Permanent one-time storage	Fast storage for frequently accessed files
Mechanism	Miners rent out hard drive space, paid in FIL	One-time payment funds permanent storage via endowment	Built on Sui, optimised for speed and hot data
Primary users	Developers, enterprises with bulk data	Archivists, NFT projects, enterprises	App developers needing fast retrieval
Strengths	Largest network, handles massive datasets	Truly permanent, no recurring cost	Fast, modern architecture, growing ecosystem
Weaknesses	Slow retrieval, token volatility	High upfront cost, slow retrieval	Unproven at scale, hot data only
Pricing model	Ongoing rental (pay per time)	One-time upfront payment	Usage-based (pay per access)
Maturity	Established but adoption lagging	Stable since 2018	Early stage, growing fast
Best analogy	Decentralised AWS S3	Decentralised Internet Archive	Decentralised CDN

Which one should you actually use?

There is no single winner. The right protocol depends entirely on what you are building and what you value most.

Use Filecoin if you need to store enormous volumes of cold data at the lowest possible cost per gigabyte. If you are running a data archive, a backup pipeline, or a large-scale data marketplace and retrieval latency is not a constraint, Filecoin's network size gives it a practical edge. Go in with eyes open about the token volatility and slower retrieval times.

Use Arweave if permanence and immutability are non-negotiable. Arweave is the only protocol where "store it once and it lasts forever" is an architectural guarantee, not a marketing claim. For NFT metadata, legal records, scientific data, or historical archives, Arweave is the clear choice. Accept the upfront cost as the price of true permanence.

Use Walrus if you are building a live, user-facing Web3 application and you need storage to behave more like a CDN than an archive. Walrus is for the developer who was previously forced to use AWS S3 because nothing decentralised was fast enough. It is early days, but if you are building on Sui or need high-performance decentralised storage, Walrus is the most interesting development in this space right now.

The honest recommendation: For most production Web3 projects in 2026, a hybrid approach is the most pragmatic. Arweave for permanent metadata and critical records. Walrus or a traditional CDN for fast-access media. Filecoin only if raw bulk storage cost is a primary concern. No single protocol dominates all three dimensions of the storage trilemma: cost, speed, and permanence. Understanding which dimension matters most for your use case is the real decision.

The decentralised storage wars are far from over. But the tools are finally mature enough to build on seriously.

The Yellow SDK: The "Lego Kit" for Building the Future of Web3

Vrushali sontakke — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:31:11 +0000

If the $YELLOW token is the fuel and Yellow.pro is the car, then the Yellow SDK is the factory that lets anyone build their own vehicle.

But unless you're a developer, "SDK" (Software Development Kit) sounds like something you'd find in a dusty manual. Let's break it down into why it actually matters for the person building the next big app.

What is it?

Imagine you're trying to build a business that accepts payments from five different countries, but every country uses a different language, a different currency, and a different set of rules. You'd have to hire five different teams just to talk to them.

The Yellow SDK acts like a universal translator. Instead of a developer having to learn the "language" of Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon separately, they just talk to the SDK. The SDK handles all the complicated "translation" work behind the scenes.

What ships with v1?

The v1 release includes three packages, each built for a different use case:

@yellow-org/sdk is the main TypeScript package. It gives you everything out of the box: a WebSocket RPC client for real-time communication with Clearnode, EVM blockchain bindings for on-chain settlement (built on top of viem), state channel management with cryptographic signing, and ERC-20 token handling. If you're building a new app from scratch, this is your starting point. You get methods like Deposit, Withdraw, Transfer, and the full app session lifecycle without touching a single smart contract directly.

@yellow-org/sdk-compat is the migration bridge. If you were building on the v0.5.3 API, this package wraps the new SDK internals and exposes the old interface. Same method signatures, same patterns, but running on v1 under the hood. It ships as a peer dependency of @yellow-org/sdk, so you're never loading two separate engines. When you're ready to move to native v1 calls, the migration is incremental, not a rewrite.

The Go SDK (github.com/layer-3/nitrolite/sdk/go) covers the same ground for backend services and infrastructure. Same state operations, same settlement flow, same app session management, just in Go. It's designed for teams running high-throughput services where TypeScript isn't the right fit.

What does it actually do?

The SDK gives developers a set of tools to build apps that are:

Fast (The "Web2" Feel): It uses those "bar tabs" (state channels) we talked about. Transactions happen off-chain between parties, and only the final state gets settled on-chain. This means an app built with the SDK feels as fast as Instagram or Twitter. Users sign state transitions locally, and the SDK handles packing, hashing, and verification before anything touches the network.
Chain-Agnostic: The SDK abstracts blockchain specifics behind a common interface. Developers configure their target chains through the client options, and the SDK resolves asset metadata, contract addresses, and RPC endpoints automatically. Write once, deploy across chains.
Bridge-less: Usually, moving value between chains means trusting a third-party bridge, and that comes with real risk. The SDK routes cross-chain transfers through Yellow's ClearNet, which handles settlement at the protocol level. No bridge contracts, no wrapped tokens, no extra trust assumptions.

The "Why" for Developers

Building in Web3 is usually a nightmare. You have to deal with gas fees, slow transaction times, and making sure your users don't accidentally lose their keys.

The Yellow SDK handles the infrastructure layer: channel negotiation, state signing with multiple signer types (wallet signers, session key signers, app session signers), on-chain checkpointing, and dispute resolution through the challenge flow. Developers get to focus on the fun stuff, like making a better game, a faster trading bot, or a smoother payment app.

The Momentum: 500+ Projects and Counting

This isn't just a theory. As of March 2026, over 500 projects are already using the SDK to build. Yellow also just launched the Builders Alliance, which is basically a support system (mentorship, funding, and marketing) for anyone using the SDK to create real value.