Arweave vs Filecoin: Permanent Web Storage

One-time, upfront payment for 200+ years of storage. This eliminates recurring fees and creates a true permanent data layer. This matters for protocols storing critical, immutable assets like NFTs (Solana, Polygon), DAO archives, or foundational datasets where long-term accessibility is non-negotiable.

Higher upfront capital requirement compared to short-term Filecoin deals. The endowment model prices in centuries of replication and mining rewards. This matters for large-scale, cold storage use cases where initial budget is a primary constraint, though the long-term TCO can be lower.

Decentralized storage marketplace with competitive, short-term pricing (e.g., 6-month deals). Leverages unused global hard drive capacity. This matters for cost-sensitive applications with large, mutable datasets (like Web2 backups, video rendering, or temporary rollup data) where users want to pay-as-they-go.

Requires active deal renewal and liveness proofs. Data is not guaranteed permanent by protocol design; it's a marketplace of renewable contracts. This matters for "set-and-forget" archival use cases, as it introduces operational overhead and renewal risk that Arweave's endowment model avoids.

Specific advantage: Pay once for 200+ years of storage via an endowment model. This matters for projects requiring long-term data integrity without recurring costs, like NFT metadata, legal documents, or scientific archives. Current cost: ~$0.02/MB for permanent storage.

Specific advantage: Data retrieval is fast and predictable, as files are stored on-chain in a blockweave structure. This matters for front-end hosting (permaweb) and dApps needing sub-2 second access to stored assets, unlike retrieval-market delays.

Specific advantage: Market-based pricing via a decentralized storage network (16+ EiB capacity). This matters for bulk, cold storage use cases like Web2 backups, genomic datasets, or video libraries where cost-per-GB is the primary driver and retrieval latency is acceptable.

Specific advantage: Users negotiate custom terms (duration, redundancy, price) with storage providers. This matters for enterprise clients with specific SLAs or data that has a known, finite lifespan, providing flexibility Arweave's permanent model does not.

Specific trade-off: The one-time fee is based on a conservative endowment model tied to AR token value and storage cost projections. This matters for budgeting, as long-term guarantees introduce financial modeling complexity versus Filecoin's straightforward recurring payments.

Specific trade-off: Data retrieval depends on a secondary deal-making market; if your provider is offline, you must find another, potentially causing delays. This matters for applications requiring guaranteed, instant access like serving live website assets or in-game content.

One-time, upfront payment for 200+ years of storage via its endowment model. This eliminates recurring fees and is ideal for NFT metadata, archival data, and permanent records where data integrity over centuries is non-negotiable.

Competitive, auction-based pricing creates a dynamic marketplace where storage costs are often lower than centralized alternatives. This is optimal for large-scale cold storage, dataset backups, and cost-sensitive applications requiring petabytes of space.

The lump-sum payment can be prohibitive for storing large volumes of data with uncertain long-term value. It's less suitable for high-throughput applications, temporary data, or projects with variable storage needs where pay-as-you-go is preferred.

Deals must be manually or programmatically renewed (typically every 1-1.5 years), introducing operational overhead and risk of data loss if lapsed. This adds complexity for "set-and-forget" archives or applications demanding absolute, hands-off permanence.

Fast, permissionless access via HTTP gateways with predictable performance. This is critical for dApps, frontends, and public datasets where low-latency, reliable retrieval is as important as the storage itself.

While storage is robust, the retrieval market is less developed, potentially leading to slower or more expensive data access compared to storage. This is a key consideration for applications requiring frequent, high-speed data reads or CDN-like performance.