Every major development in the internet has the winner hidden in the infrastructure.

Looking back at the evolution of the internet, there is an unchanging underlying logic: the application layer creates prosperity, but the infrastructure is the ceiling.

Web3 cannot escape this rule either.

In the past few years, the industry's focus has almost never left blockchain throughput and application stories. But there has been a more fundamental question lingering—where should the data be stored?

On-chain storage? Too expensive.

Off-chain storage? Trust model collapses directly.

Centralized servers? That’s not Web3 anymore.

This dilemma is precisely the backdrop for the emergence of a new generation of data availability infrastructure. For example, some projects have very unique ideas—not traditional decentralized storage competitors, but solutions that truly address Web3’s most practical needs: handling massive data, supporting frequent calls, and ensuring long-term availability.

Through erasure coding and distributed verification mechanisms, these solutions can fragment, redundantly store, and make data recoverable, maintaining censorship resistance while bringing costs down to a level that applications can afford.

This is far more than just "cheaper storage."

The specific chain reactions are:

NFTs can now carry more than just image hash pointers—videos, 3D models, interactive content can be natively on-chain.

Blockchain games are completely freed from dependence on centralized servers, truly decentralized operation.

Decentralized social media and AI-native applications are turning from whitepapers into actionable plans for the first time.

From a deeper perspective, the role of these data infrastructure projects is similar to the combination of cloud storage and CDN in the Web2 era—but a decentralized, verifiable, trustless version.

The temperament of infrastructure projects is like this:

They won’t generate explosive short-term hype, but once locked into the ecosystem, they have almost no competitors.

They iterate slowly, but once they become standards, they are unbreakable.

If the previous phase of Web3 was a carnival of financial innovation, the next phase will inevitably be a true explosion of data and applications. And these foundational projects are precisely at the forefront of this wave.