Introduction to Decentralized Storage

Blockchains excel at consensus on small state changes — balances, ownership records, and contract logic. They are a poor place to store images, videos, game assets, or full application databases. Every byte replicated across thousands of nodes would make fees prohibitive and sync times unbearable.

Decentralized storage networks trade the convenience of a single cloud provider for censorship resistance, verifiable integrity, and operator diversity. IPFS handles content addressing and peer distribution. Filecoin adds economic incentives for long-term persistence. Arweave targets permanent archives with upfront payment.

This course walks through each layer — why centralized storage fails Web3 assumptions, how the major networks work, pinning and economics, NFT metadata pitfalls, encryption patterns, dApp integration, and where the stack is heading next.