From the perspective of the 5-10 billion market value potential of Warlus, how does CESS define the next generation storage paradigm in the storage track?

Author: CESS

Recently, the storage sector has once again become the focus of the crypto market. The Warlus project has rapidly risen to prominence among investors due to its innovative technical architecture and business model. This project, based on a modular narrative of "error correction code technology + low replication factor," has secured $140 million in funding, with a latest valuation reaching $2 billion (FDV). Its strategic positioning within the Sui ecosystem has garnered widespread market optimism, predicting its market capitalization could potentially reach $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/TB/year), Warlus has lowered costs to $100/TB/year, equivalent to 1/80 of traditional solutions. This groundbreaking cost-effectiveness has the potential to tap into trillion-dollar market scenarios such as AI training data and streaming content, thereby opening up vast commercial opportunities.

However, current storage projects exhibit a clear divergence in technical routes. Filecoin focuses on cold storage, Arweave emphasizes permanent data archiving, while Warlus, despite its impressive technological innovations, has yet to validate its commercialization capabilities in high-frequency dynamic data processing. 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 transcending the boundaries of traditional storage sectors with a new positioning as a data value infrastructure, building an ecosystem 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 Sector: A Test of Technical Routes and Commercialization Capabilities

The storage sector is undergoing a period of rapid development. Changes on the demand side are particularly significant. On one hand, the demand for training data in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has surged dramatically, with an annual growth rate of 30%. This demand places higher requirements on storage technology, especially in terms of performance and scalability when handling large-scale data. The widespread deployment of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) devices is also increasing the frequency of data interactions between storage devices, further driving 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 GDPR and CCPA, has established strict distinctions between data ownership and usage rights, as well as standardized management of cross-border data flows, highlighting the compliance advantages of decentralized storage, which has become a key factor in project competition.

Currently, mainstream projects in the storage sector each have their own focus. Filecoin, as a pioneer, has built a large storage network, but it is mainly suitable for cold data storage, with weak real-time retrieval capabilities; Arweave focuses on permanent data storage, using block weaving technology to ensure data durability, but its storage costs are high and unsuitable for frequently updated dynamic data; Warlus relies on innovative error correction code technology to significantly reduce storage costs, but its ecosystem development is still in the early stages.

In this competitive landscape, CESS positions itself with technological innovation in dynamic data storage and real-time interaction scenarios, 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 sector.

2. CESS's Technological Moat: Six Innovations Defining the Next Generation of Storage Standards

As a next-generation decentralized storage network, CESS's technical architecture fundamentally breaks through the limitations of traditional storage projects. Compared to projects like Filecoin, CESS has achieved revolutionary breakthroughs across multiple core technical dimensions.

Firstly, CESS has innovatively realized efficient storage and real-time retrieval of dynamic data. Imagine if traditional blockchain storage systems like Filecoin are a large but slowly moving library, then CESS is like an efficient modern smart library that can store books while also allowing real-time querying, updating, and distribution of content. The CD²N technology is the core engine of this revolution. It functions like a global neural network; when a user needs to access a file, the system can locate and transmit data in milliseconds (under 50 milliseconds), which is over 40 times faster than Filecoin's response time of over 2 seconds. This means users can stream videos, conduct real-time transactions, or run applications requiring frequent data interactions as smoothly as using centralized services, without noticeable delays.

The PoDR² multi-replica recoverable proof technology addresses the issue of data reliability in decentralized networks. CESS has innovatively proposed the PoDR² (multi-replica recoverable proof) technology, which, through data sharding and encrypted storage, allows the system to automatically detect and repair damaged data replicas, increasing data availability to 99.99% and effectively solving 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 automatically recover data from other healthy nodes, ensuring service continuity. It is like when a book in a library is damaged, the system can immediately retrieve the same book from another branch and repair the damaged one, ensuring the reader's experience is unaffected.

In terms of security and privacy protection, CESS's developed Proxy Re-encryption Technology (PReT) achieves precise separation of data ownership and usage rights, supporting fine-grained permission management to meet the compliance needs of strictly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. It is like a sophisticated visitor management system where data owners can precisely control who can view which parts of the data, for how long, and can even revoke access at any time. For example, a hospital can authorize a research institution to access de-identified patient data for research without worrying about data being copied or misused, as the system will automatically revoke access once 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 already been applied in several medical institutions' pathology data sharing projects, allowing sensitive medical data to be used for AI model training while protecting patient privacy, thus advancing medical research. By integrating 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, a capability that has been validated in multiple medical institutions' pathology data sharing projects.

Additionally, CESS has demonstrated unique advantages in developer ecosystem construction. Its storage resource pooling technology integrates idle devices globally, reducing the hardware threshold for miners by 70%, enabling flexible configurations such as supporting 2TB + 3TB miners to collaboratively store 5TB 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 integration difficulty for developers.

Specifically, CESS supports multiple small-capacity devices to work together; for example, a 2TB device and a 3TB device can collectively provide 5TB of storage service, greatly 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's development based on the Substrate framework and its seamless compatibility with the Polkadot ecosystem enable developers to easily integrate the storage services provided by CESS. For developers, this is like obtaining 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 Momentum and Ecological Explosion

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

Moreover, the recent public beta testing and airdrop event of DeShare launched by CESS has achieved remarkable results, with a single event starting in March surpassing 600,000 users. This figure is particularly impressive in the current market environment, showcasing CESS's strong user base and ecological vitality. While expanding the project's user group, this event has also accumulated a large number of potential users for future commercial applications after the mainnet launch. Notably, CESS plans to issue tokens and launch its mainnet in the second quarter of this year, marking 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 could become a key catalyst for 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 invited again to Congress for technical sharing and demonstration, 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 be one of the key factors determining a project's success or failure. CESS's proactive layout in this regard undoubtedly lays a solid foundation for its future global development.

4. Paradigm Revolutionaries in the Storage Sector

CESS's technical architecture precisely fills the technological gap in the current 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 using real-time data processing capabilities. This differentiated positioning gives CESS a unique advantage in the competitive landscape, with the potential to lead the next paradigm revolution in storage technology.

As blockchain applications expand from financial transactions to broader fields, the demand for storage systems is shifting from simple data preservation to complex data value networks. CESS's technical architecture aligns perfectly with this trend, as its real-time interaction capabilities, security and privacy protection, and developer-friendly ecosystem collectively build a comprehensive data value network, rather than merely a decentralized "hard drive."

CESS's vision extends far beyond becoming a storage service provider; it aims to create a complete data value network. In this network, data can be securely stored and effectively utilized to create more value. This upgrade from storage hard drives to a data value network will propel Web3 into an era of large-scale commercial applications.

Summary

As a core component of blockchain infrastructure, the importance of the storage sector is increasingly highlighted with the richness of Web3 application scenarios. CESS, with its innovative technologies in dynamic data storage, security and privacy protection, and developer ecosystems, is defining the next generation of storage paradigms. Its core technologies, which have been realized while traditional projects like Filecoin have yet to achieve, such as millisecond retrieval capabilities, automatic data repair, and fine-grained permission management, provide CESS with a competitive advantage.

With CESS set to issue tokens and launch its mainnet in the second quarter, the project is poised for explosive growth. Leveraging technological stacking and ecological positioning, CESS is upgrading from an infrastructure provider to a data value network operator. Its commercialization capabilities and capital density may make it the next $10 billion-level Web3 super protocol following Warlus.

The future of the storage sector 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 sector and is building a comprehensive data value infrastructure, a data value-driven engine that empowers the entire Web3 ecosystem, thereby redefining the flow, processing, and value realization mechanisms of data in the on-chain world.