Arweave vs Celestia: Permanent Storage vs Live Consensus for Data Availability

One-time, perpetual payment: Pay ~$5-10 upfront for 1 GB stored forever. This is ideal for NFT metadata, static web apps, and historical archives where data must be immutable and accessible for decades without recurring fees.

Endowment model ensures 200+ years of storage via a decentralized endowment. This provides a cryptographic guarantee of permanence, critical for legal documents, scientific data, and foundational protocol components that cannot risk deletion.

Pay-as-you-go for live data: Costs scale with block space used (~$0.003 per 100 KB). Optimized for high-frequency rollups (e.g., Eclipse, Arbitrum Orbit) needing sub-cent fees and 10,000+ TPS for state diffs and proofs.

Pure Data Availability layer decoupled from execution. Rollups post blobs via Data Availability Sampling (DAS), enabling light nodes to verify data without downloading entire chains. Best for sovereign rollups and rapid chain deployment.

• Permanent Assets: NFT media, game assets, long-term archives.
• Static Content: Decentralized front-ends (e.g., SCP-01 standard).
• Foundational Data: Protocol blueprints, immutable smart contracts (via Warp Contracts).
• Use Case: When data deletion is a existential risk and predictable, sunk cost is acceptable.

• High-Throughput Rollups: Optimistic & ZK-rollups needing cheap, frequent data posting.
• Sovereign Chains: Chains requiring their own settlement and governance.
• Modular Stacks: Integrating with EigenDA, Avail for multi-DA strategies.
• Use Case: When you need minimal marginal cost per transaction and data is only needed for live fraud/validity proofs (~2 weeks).

One-time fee for perpetual storage: Pay ~$0.02/MB once for 200+ years of guaranteed data persistence via the endowment model. This is critical for NFT metadata, legal documents, and scientific datasets where permanent, immutable archival is non-negotiable. Protocols like Solana (via Bundlr) and Avalanche use it for permanent state snapshots.

Predictable, upfront cost structure: No recurring fees or gas costs for data availability after the initial upload. This eliminates budgeting uncertainty for long-term projects. Ideal for static assets, front-end hosting (like dApp websites via Arweave), and archival logs where data is written once and read many times.

Optimized for rollup data blobs: Celestia's consensus-based DA provides ~16 MB per block capacity with sub-cent fees for temporary data availability (typically 2+ weeks). This is optimal for high-frequency L2 rollups (like Eclipse, Dymension) and sovereign chains that need cheap, scalable DA for live transaction sequencing, not permanent storage.

Decouples execution from consensus: Developers can launch a sovereign rollup or L2 with any execution environment (EVM, SVM, CosmWasm) while leveraging Celestia for secure DA. This enables rapid chain deployment and customization without managing a validator set. Used by Manta, AltLayer, and Saga for their modular stack.

Not designed for real-time sequencing: Finality can take ~2 minutes, and throughput is bounded by storage propagation, not consensus speed. A poor fit for high-speed rollups or DeFi applications requiring sub-second data posting. Competitors like EigenDA or Avail are built for this live-data use case.

Data availability window, not forever: Data is guaranteed to be available for challenges (typically weeks), not archived indefinitely. Projects needing permanent access must layer additional storage solutions (like Arweave or Filecoin). Adds complexity and cost for long-term data retrievability.

Indefinite, on-chain storage: Data is stored permanently via a one-time, upfront payment. This is critical for archival dApps, NFT provenance, and permanent records where data must be accessible for decades, independent of the originating chain's state.

~$0.000001 per KiB (one-time): Pricing is optimized for long-term archival, not high-frequency posting. This makes it cost-prohibitive for high-throughput rollups like gaming or social apps that generate massive transaction volumes.

~$0.000000001 per KiB (recurring): Optimized for high-frequency data posting by rollups. With 16 MB blocks and 1.4 MB/s throughput, it supports scaling for Ethereum L2s (Arbitrum, Optimism), high-TPS appchains, and permaweb caches.

~30-day data availability guarantee: Nodes prune data after this period, relying on light clients for fraud proofs. This is a trade-off for cost and scalability, requiring rollups to implement their own long-term archival solutions (e.g., via Arweave or Filecoin) for historical data.