I initially discovered this project through the Sui ecosystem airdrop list. It was widely circulated in the community—saying it raised 140 million USD and was considered a core storage infrastructure for the ecosystem. But honestly, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Just another project riding the decentralized storage wave, no different from the many I’ve played with before. After the airdrop, the tokens went straight into my wallet to gather dust, and I didn’t even check the market once.

The real turning point was at the end of last year. During that time, my friends and I were creating Web3 content, with a huge pile of video materials and text documents. We used centralized cloud storage, which was insanely expensive, and we constantly had to worry about platform risk controls deleting our content—that nerve-wracking feeling was really exhausting. I tried two traditional decentralized storage solutions: one had such slow retrieval speeds it was maddening, and the other was more expensive than centralized services. After half a month of trying without any results, I suddenly remembered that project I had discarded during wallet organization.

With the mindset of “no real loss anyway,” I migrated some of my materials there. The experience? Surprisingly good. That made me seriously reconsider this thing I had ignored for over half a year. I sat down and spent quite some time studying it in depth, and only then realized how ridiculous my previous biases were—I hadn’t understood what they were actually doing, and I was quick to judge.

I approached it from real-world use cases—storage functionality, retrieval efficiency, cost structure—these genuine experiences are more convincing than any whitepaper terminology. When I first encountered technical concepts like Red Stuff erasure coding, I was completely confused, but gradually I understood why this solution found a balance between storage redundancy and cost. Looking back now, that’s why many Web3 creators and developers are using it.