It is very difficult to fully document the history of the internet. Forums shut down, images go offline, links turn into 404s — this is not an accident, but an inevitable outcome of centralized storage. We rely on data to exist permanently every day, yet rarely think about how fragile it really is.

Web3 originally aimed to change all this, allowing value to exist independently of platforms. But reality hits harder: value can be on-chain, yet storage is still controlled by centralized servers. The price of an NFT is forever recorded on the blockchain, but the content it represents might completely disappear the moment a data center loses power.

This is a blind spot many overlook. Distributed storage protocols are filling this gap. Their logic is straightforward — don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Data is split, encoded, and dispersed across the network. The failure of any single node cannot threaten the content itself.

More importantly, this data can interact with smart contracts in real time. Storage is no longer just coldly “lying there,” but can be verified, referenced, and dynamically combined to become an active part of application logic. On-chain content, game assets, AI training data — these scenarios finally have a truly reliable infrastructure.

In this network, tokens are like gears. They coordinate supply and demand for storage, incentivize node participation, and maintain the entire system’s smooth operation through economic rules. Storage has moved from the background to the center stage for the first time, becoming an indispensable part of Web3.

When hype fades, what remains are never just shiny concepts, but data that can still be truly read. Perhaps what we should care about isn’t where the next hot spot is, but who is seriously working to preserve content for the future.