I’ve pondered a question for a long time—why do Web3 applications that have sound logic and decent products always fail to grow big? It wasn’t until a certain moment that I realized: the bottleneck isn’t in the code or market conditions, but in a neglected blind spot—data storage uncertainty.

In the early stages of a project, this issue doesn’t seem apparent at all. With few users, small data volumes, and short lifecycles, everything is well concealed. No one cares if images are stored on centralized servers, and no one questions the behavior records in off-chain databases. Everyone knows that these kinds of projects probably won’t go far. But once you truly aim to turn it into a long-term product, this logic immediately collapses.

I found a clear dividing line—the moment the application starts consuming historical data. Blockchain games need to preserve players’ long-term progress, content platforms need to accumulate creator assets, and AI applications need to repeatedly call models and training data. Once these data become the lifeblood of the system, you can no longer treat them as external resources that can be replaced at any time. At this stage, storage issues will snowball into an uncontrollable problem.

The uncertainty I’m talking about here isn’t about security risks, but more tangible hidden dangers: Will the service suddenly go down? Will it be unilaterally interrupted? Will it be secretly altered when you have no control? Centralized solutions inherently carry this risk.