Why Decentralized Storage Must Solve the Discovery Problem

Today's dApps query data through centralized APIs like The Graph's hosted service or Infura's IPFS gateway, reintroducing censorship and downtime risks.

• Single Point of Failure: A gateway outage can brick entire applications.
• Censorship Vector: Gatekeepers can filter or block access to specific content.
• Data Integrity Risk: You must trust the indexer's query results, not the raw chain data.

Raw storage protocols lack a standardized way to ask complex questions (e.g., "all NFTs owned by X"), forcing developers to build and maintain custom indexing infrastructure.

• Developer Burden: Teams spend months building indexers instead of core logic.
• Fragmented Data: Each app creates its own siloed, often inconsistent, view of the same on-chain state.
• No Composability: Custom indexers cannot be easily shared or verified by other protocols.

Mobile and browser clients cannot feasibly sync the entire chain or storage network, making them trust centralized RPCs for data. True decentralization requires verifiable proofs for any query.

• Trust Assumption: Light clients must trust the RPC provider's response.
• Proof Complexity: Merkle proofs for simple balances exist, but proofs for complex queries (SQL joins, aggregations) are unsolved at scale.
• Bandwidth Overhead: Downloading full state for verification is impossible for end-user devices.

Storing data on-chain or in decentralized storage creates isolated silos. Developers must run their own indexers or rely on centralized gateways, creating single points of failure and high overhead.

• Fragmented Access: Each protocol (Arweave, IPFS, Filecoin) requires custom tooling.
• Centralized Choke Points: Public gateways like Infura for IPFS negate decentralization benefits.
• Developer Friction: Building a custom indexer for a simple query takes weeks and ~$50k+ in dev costs.

A decentralized indexing protocol that subgraphs smart contract data, allowing for fast, reliable queries. It's the foundational layer for dApp data discovery.

• Subgraph Standard: 30k+ subgraphs index data from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, etc.
• Incentivized Network: Indexers, Curators, and Delegators secure the network with ~$2B+ in GRT staked.
• Query Market: Consumers pay in GRT for queries, creating a sustainable data economy.

KYVE solves the garbage-in problem for decentralized data. It validates, standardizes, and immutably stores any data stream (e.g., blockchain history, price feeds) onto Arweave.

• Trustless Validation: A network of validators and uploaders ensures data integrity before archival.
• Standardized Pools: Data is formatted into easily queryable bundles, turning raw streams into a verified API.
• Cross-Chain Foundation: Critical for indexing historical data from Cosmos, Ethereum, Solana, and more.

Bridges the gap between decentralized storage and structured querying. Provides SQL tables where the metadata lives on-chain (EVM) and the data content lives on IPFS.

• SQL for Web3: Enables familiar CREATE, INSERT, UPDATE operations with on-chain access control.
• Dynamic NFTs & Apps: Powers mutable NFT metadata and complex dApp state that scales off-chain.
• Hybrid Architecture: Combines the governance of smart contracts with the scalability of IPFS.

A decentralized graph database network for user-centric data. ComposeDB provides a composable, scalable data layer where users own their social graphs and profile data.

• Data Composability: Models are portable, allowing any app to read/write to a user's unified data stream.
• User-Centric: Shifts paradigm from application silos to user-controlled datastores.
• IPLD-Based: Built on InterPlanetary Linked Data, enabling complex, traversable data relationships.

The endgame is a seamless stack: KYVE validates raw data, Arweave/Filecoin store it, The Graph indexes it, and Tableland/Ceramic structure it. Discovery becomes a public utility.

• Interoperable Indexing: Cross-protocol queries that pull from multiple storage layers simultaneously.
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs: For private querying of sensitive on-chain or off-chain data.
• Cost Collapse: Automated discovery reduces marginal data access cost to ~$0.001 per query, unlocking new dApp categories.

Data stored on Arweave or Filecoin is cryptographically secure but functionally isolated. Without a universal discovery layer, dApps cannot query or trustlessly verify data across protocols, creating a network of walled gardens.

• Result: Inefficient capital allocation and fragmented liquidity.
• Opportunity: A unified index unlocks $10B+ in latent value from stored data assets.

Protocols like KYVE and The Graph point the way, but for storage. The endgame is a decentralized network that provides cryptographic proofs for data queries, not just storage. This turns static data into programmable inputs for DeFi, AI, and social apps.

• Key Benefit: Enables trust-minimized data oracles.
• Key Benefit: Creates a new primitive for data-backed financial instruments.

The infrastructure moat shifts from petabytes stored to queries served. The winning protocol will abstract away the underlying storage layer (be it Arweave, Filecoin, or Celestia) and provide a unified API for discovery and verification.

• Metric to Watch: Query volume & fee capture, not just storage capacity.
• Analog: The Google of Web3 data, not just the hard drive.

Don't build another S3 competitor. Build the GraphQL for Web3 data. Integrate with major storage networks and focus on developer UX for querying and proving. The first team to offer a seamless, verifiable discovery layer will capture the middleware stack.

• Action: Build indexing that supports data attestations.
• Action: Prioritize integration with EVM, Solana, and Cosmos app chains.