The first time I heard about Lagrange was at a Filecoin ecosystem sharing session. The person on stage said, "It aims to create a faster channel for decentralized storage."
Until I tried to store a batch of design drafts on Filecoin myself—guess what? Storing went smoothly, but two months later when I wanted to retrieve it, I waited nearly half an hour for it to load, and the fees were twice what I expected. A friend told me, "This is the old problem of decentralized storage; data is scattered across different nodes, and retrieving it is like finding your way in a maze. Not only is it slow, but if a node is offline, you might not be able to retrieve it at all."
It built a layer of "intelligent scheduling" on top of the Filecoin mainnet—simply put, it adds a "navigation system" to those scattered storage nodes. When I store the same batch of design drafts, it automatically analyzes which nodes have a high online rate and are closest to me, prioritizing the data storage on these nodes; when I want to retrieve it, it directly calls the nearest node, and the loading speed is at least 5 times faster than before, with significantly reduced fees.
What surprised me even more was its "fault tolerance mechanism." Once, when I stored a video file, one of the storage nodes suddenly went offline. In the past, I might have had to re-upload it. But Lagrange directly retrieved a copy of the data from a backup node, and I was not delayed at all; it was as smooth as using a centralized cloud drive, yet still maintained the security of decentralization.
I asked the developers, and they said that what Lagrange aims to do is not to "start from scratch," but to "optimize Filecoin with patches." For example, small file storage used to be costly and inefficient on Filecoin, so Lagrange created a "combined storage" system that packages multiple small files into a single "large file," reducing costs by more than half; for enterprise-level users concerned about data privacy, it added end-to-end encryption, so only they can decrypt it, and node service providers cannot see the content.
Now, many of my friends working on Web3 applications have started using Lagrange. A guy who runs an NFT platform said that users used to complain about "not being able to store or retrieve images quickly," but after integrating Lagrange, complaints dropped by more than half—after all, users don’t care how decentralized the underlying system is; they only care about whether it is "user-friendly."
