Old Deng can only go crazy once.
Long-time readers may remember that the third article posted by this account was 'Bodhi', a small tool based on the Arweave storage chain. Recently, Aptos launched the storage platform Shelby, which is comparable to AWS. The launches of tokens from Filecoin/Arweave, and even Ton Storage, BNB GreenField, and Sui Walrus, have not excited people as much because Shelby signifies the return of Jump Trading.
The one who supported the early price of SOL, the true founder of the Solana conspiracy group, the inventor of Solana 2.0 Firedancer, the one who proclaimed that the speed of light is the limit, Jump Trading has returned to the crypto world.
However, let's lower our expectations first; this could be a conspiracy of Jump's return, a clichéd story of Aptos strongly hitting back at Sui. From CZ to Jump, these once-famous big names seem to have not escaped the law of mean reversion.
Jump's return
Leaving aside Shelby and Aptos, let's talk about Jump's glorious achievements or history of harvesting profits. Apart from SOL mentioned earlier, the collapses of FTX and UST/Luna are also related.
Although it has multiple funds like Jump Crypto and Jump Capital, the market-making business Jump Trading is its core money-printing machine, comparable to Simmons' medal-winning fund. It is not only keen on making money but also actively develops and trades everything related.
During the FTX collapse, Jump was mired in a public relations crisis, frequently facing investigations from departments like the SEC and CFTC. However, after Trump took office, a 'loose regulatory' and even de-regulatory policy was adopted for DeFi and cryptocurrencies. After paying fines, Jump restarted.
Shelby is the first major project focused on the underlying value of crypto after its return, which is different from simple investment. Referring to Sui's Walrus token issuance route, if Shelby is indeed Jump's new project, it will undoubtedly spark a new wave in crypto.
If guessed wrong, it would be similar to Nansen's anti-witch business, merely for processing and doing business. Interestingly, both Aptos and Sui are projects invested in by Jump.
Heresy is more detestable than heretics.
After reading the Shelby white paper, I found that Shelby falls short of Jump's consistent standards and is more like a 'shelf product' aimed at competing with Sui's walrus, merely a gathering of existing concepts.
Aptos and Sui, as twins of the Move system, have consistently adhered to a strategy that they can be surpassed by ETH or SOL, but must not be outpaced by each other.
Shelf product Shelby
Even if Jump is not what it used to be, its actions are still remarkable. For example, Shelby's goal is not just to read small images, but to achieve high-difficulty scenarios like 4K streaming, TB-level AI training data, or collaborative online office work.
Intuitively, this goal seems a bit beyond expectations, even more abstract than coin stocks, which only need to be centralized, but the competitors in cloud services are AWS or Microsoft.
After reading the white paper thoroughly, several facts can be observed:
1. Reading performance bottleneck: paid reading mechanism + Aptos storage SDK.
2. Storage reliability: Erasure coding mechanism + on-chain/off-chain hybrid auditing.
3. Economic sustainability → micropayment channels + on-chain rewards and penalties.
More detailed explanation
• Cold storage to hot storage: compared to Filecoin and Arweave, which focus on storing data, Shelby aims at reading data.
• Clay erasure code reduces redundancy backup: the more backups there are, the higher the safety; Shelby takes an unconventional route by introducing an erasure coding mechanism, reducing the main body backup to about 2 times.
• Off-chain should never go on-chain: off-chain auditing combined with on-chain verification, off-chain authenticity combined with on-chain truth-seeking, local caching combined with on-chain reading.
Image description: Comparison of Shelby and mainstream storage services. Image source: Shelby Whitepaper.
Let's break this down further. Filecoin is essentially a miner's game; the $FIL economic model encourages miners to back up data frantically, thus eventually becoming a price comparison mechanism between hard disk prices and $FIL, with everyone investing in hard drives before the $FIL crash.
The only difference between Filecoin and Ethereum is that Ethereum has real utility, but no B-end businesses or individuals use Filecoin in their daily operations.
Arweave is the extreme opposite of Filecoin, its economic model is 'one-time payment, permanent storage', and the core is that $AR releases must be slow enough to continually stimulate miners not to delete data. However, this fundamentally limits Arweave's scale. The reasoning is simple: the more you store, the higher the maintenance costs, requiring an exceptionally slow time to break even.
One of Shelby's smartest moves is to reduce redundancy backup requirements, boldly lowering it to around 2x, which is close to the traditional AWS's 1.2x, while charging for reading actions as a revenue source for the storage layer.
This is a normal commercial storage project, building a intermediary system to guide users to pay for usage, but the stimulating effect of cryptocurrency will change everything.
Image description: Shelby structure. Image source: @zuoyeweb3.
In Jump's design, the storage, RPC nodes, and payments of users will distort the original normal path. For instance, users might still create useless storage to obtain potential $SHELBY tokens, provided that the expected airdrop exceeds the small payment for viewing fees.
Unless everything is priced in U, then one must face direct competition with AWS. Jump has also stated that AWS's daily storage cost is only $0.00000077 per MB, and reading cost is only $0.00002 per MB.
Considering that AWS has been operating for many years and has passed the early stage of losing money to gain market share, it's hard to believe that Web3 native storage projects can compete with it.
Fundamentally, Jump has not designed a technically excellent product like Firedancer. Although Solana has questions about its degree of centralization, it has maintained a decentralized appearance with over 1000 nodes. It's hard to imagine Shelby achieving the same stunning effect.
Conclusion
Sovereign individuals is a concept, as is Public Goods; only through commercialization can social responsibility be discussed.
The issue of Web2 platforms profiting from user data is politically incorrect, but it's a necessary path for business. If everyone remembers the attention economy in the early days of the crypto world, they surely won't forget the combination of the Brave browser and $BAT. In fact, neither of them even had a market share as large as Firefox.
Data requires economies of scale, and this is also true for storage data products. Shelby's choice of Aptos raises a question; the main reason NFTs were criticized back in the day was that NFT links were on Ethereum, while the NFT itself was on AWS. If the data of Ethereum products resides on Shelby, isn't that similar to Celestia?
Celestia has already faced criticism from Vitalik, who has shifted support to EigenLayer, so no public chain will allow products using Shelby. If it ultimately becomes exclusively for Aptos, it would be no different from Walrus on Sui.
This way, Jump's delivery quality seems to make sense.
