There's an old joke in the programmer community: "Is data eternal?" "Of course, as long as the server doesn't lose power, the company doesn't cut the department, and the product doesn't go offline." It sounds cold, but the truth is, that's the reality.

Every day, we store photos, articles, and digital assets in the cloud. It seems safe and secure, but in reality, we're just putting our most valuable things into a company's database. Change the rules, shut down the service, and those so-called "permanent storage" claims immediately become a joke. That's why some people cry on forums when their years-old works suddenly disappear — they haven't really vanished; you just can't access that place anymore.

Web3 was originally designed to solve this problem, but most projects discover an awkward truth halfway through: the blockchain is indeed decentralized, but the data still resides on someone else's servers. This kind of decentralization is at best just wearing a new coat.

Distributed storage protocols have taken a different approach. Instead of making the blockchain act as a super hard drive, it's better to completely redesign how data exists. By using efficient encoding and dispersed storage, breaking data into pieces, adding redundancy, and distributing it across multiple nodes, single points of failure can no longer determine the fate of the data. The key is, these data can be directly called by smart contracts, truly integrating into the chain's logic layer.

With this setup, many scenarios finally become feasible: NFTs are no longer hanging on a link that could fail at any moment; on-chain games and content projects no longer worry about their original resources disappearing one day; AI and Web3 data collaborations also have a reliable infrastructure.

In this system, tokens are not just ornaments. Who contributes storage space, who consumes bandwidth resources, and how to maintain long-term network stability — all are hardcoded into the protocol, forming a self-sustaining incentive loop.

Perhaps many years later, what will truly be worth remembering is not which public chain runs the fastest, but which data has been truly preserved and kept properly.