Arweave vs Filecoin for Legal & Compliance Archiving

One-time, upfront payment secures data for a minimum of 200 years via endowment model. This creates a predictable, sunk cost ideal for immutable legal records, audit trails, and regulatory filings where data must be provably unalterable forever. No recurring fees or active management required.

Direct, HTTP-based access via gateways (like arweave.net) provides instant, permissionless retrieval using a content hash. This is critical for compliance audits where regulators need immediate, verifiable access to archived documents without complex retrieval protocols or token transactions.

Competitive, market-driven storage prices via a decentralized network of storage providers. Ideal for petabyte-scale compliance data (e.g., long-term email archives, surveillance footage) where cost-per-terabyte is the primary constraint and data is rarely accessed.

Flexible deal-making and automated renewals via smart contracts (e.g., using FVM). Suits organizations needing active lifecycle management for data with retention policies (e.g., 7-year SEC rule) or those integrating storage into automated compliance workflows.

End-to-end cryptographic verification via blockweave structure. Every piece of data is linked and validated, providing a tamper-evident chain of custody essential for legal evidence. Integrity proofs are native, reducing reliance on external attestation services.

Cryptographic Proof-of-Replication (PoRep) and Spacetime (PoSt) provide verifiable proofs that data is stored as agreed. This offers strong, auditable assurances to compliance officers that multiple, geographically distributed copies are maintained, enhancing durability.

One-time, upfront payment for permanent storage: Data is guaranteed for a minimum of 200 years via the endowment model. This provides a legally defensible, immutable audit trail critical for compliance (e.g., SEC Rule 17a-4, GDPR right to erasure exemptions). No ongoing fees or renewal risks.

Built-in, timestamped cryptographic verification: Every piece of data is hashed and woven into the blockweave, creating a tamper-evident proof chain. This simplifies compliance workflows for data provenance and legal holds compared to systems requiring external notarization services.

Market-driven, competitive storage pricing: Decentralized storage providers bid for contracts, often resulting in lower costs for high-volume, cold archival data (e.g., petabytes of historical transaction logs). Ideal for compliance teams with massive, growing datasets and fixed budgets.

Programmable storage deals and proofs: Offers configurable deal durations (1-5+ years) and verifiable, ongoing Proof-of-Replication/Spacetime. Supports fast retrieval via content addressing (CIDs) for efficient audits and e-discovery requests, unlike pure archival systems.

Permanent storage premium: The one-time fee is higher than short-term rates elsewhere. This can be a barrier for experimental or temporary compliance data where retention periods are clearly defined (e.g., 7-year tax records).

Active deal management required: Teams must monitor and renew storage deals, manage provider reputation, and handle retrieval logistics. This introduces operational overhead and renewal risk versus a "set-and-forget" permanent archive, a key consideration for lean compliance teams.

Pay-as-you-go model: Storage costs are dynamic, based on market rates (currently ~$0.0000002/GB/month). This is ideal for large, time-bound datasets like 7-year SEC retention logs where indefinite storage is not required. Proof-of-Replication/Spacetime proofs provide cryptographic, on-chain verification that data is stored as agreed, a key audit requirement.

Storage deals expire: Data must be actively renewed, introducing operational overhead and renewal risk. If a deal lapses, data can become temporarily unavailable until a new deal is made. For legal holds and immutable evidence, this creates a potential chain-of-custody vulnerability that auditors may question.

True data permanence: Pay once (~$2-5 per GB upfront) for storage guaranteed for a minimum of 200 years. This creates a perfect, unbreakable chain of custody for documents like notarized contracts or court evidence. The Proof-of-Access consensus ensures data remains provably retrievable forever, eliminating renewal risk.

Substantial initial capital outlay for large archives (e.g., petabytes of medical trial data). The ~120 TPS network throughput can be a bottleneck for high-volume, real-time compliance logging from systems like trade surveillance. Better suited for final-state archiving rather than continuous ingestion.