Jump is out to do storage, and the future of choosing Aptos is uncertain
Old Deng can only go crazy once.
Old readers still remember that the third article published by this account was "Bodhi", a content-oriented gadget based on the Arweave storage chain. Recently, Aptos released Shelby, a storage platform benchmarked against AWS. For those who have survived the catastrophe of Filecoin/Arweave, even the launch of Ton Storage, BNB GreenField, and Sui Walurs, people have never been so excited,because Shelby marks the return of Jump Trading.
The person who held up the early price of SOL, the true founder of the Solana conspiracy group temperament, the inventor of Solana 2.0 Firedancer, and the crazy Jump Trading who shouted that the speed of light is the upper limit has returned to the cryptocurrency circle.
But lower your expectations first, this may be a cliché story of Jump conspiracy returning and Aptos strongly blocking Sui. From CZ to Jump, these once famous Big Names seem to have not escaped the law of mean reversion.
Jump Returns
Let’s not talk about Shelby and Aptos, let’s talk about Jump’s brilliant record or history of cutting leeks. In addition to SOL mentioned above, the collapse of FTX and UST/Luna are all related to it.
Although it has many funds such as Jump Crypto and Jump Capital, the market making business Jump Trading is its core money printing machine, comparable to Simons’ Medallion Fund. It is not only keen on making money, but also actively researches and develops everything related to trading.
When FTX collapsed, Jump was deeply mired in a public opinion crisis and frequently encountered investigations from various departments such as the SEC and CFTC. However, after Trump came to power, he adopted a "relaxed regulation" or even deregulatory policy on DeFi and cryptocurrencies. Jump started again after paying the fine.
Shelby is the first major project that focuses on the underlying value of encryption after it came out. This is different from pure investment. Referring to Sui's Walrus coin issuance route, if Shelby is really Jump's new operation project, it will inevitably set off a new wave of encryption.
If you guess wrong, it is similar to Nansen's anti-witch business, which is nothing more than processing and doing a business. Interestingly, Aptos and Sui are both Jump's invested projects.
Heretics are more hateful than pagans.
After reading the Shelby white paper, I found that Shelby has lost the consistent level of Jump. It is more like a "shelf product" for the walrus of Sui, just a work that uses the existing concepts to gather the game.
As the twins of the Move system, Aptos and Sui have always adhered to the strategy that they can be surpassed by ETH or SOL, but they must not be overtaken by the other party.
Shelf product Shelby
Even though Jump is no longer what it used to be, its moves are still extraordinary. For example, Shelby’s purpose is not to simply read small pictures, but to achieve difficult scenarios such as 4K streaming media, TB-level AI training data, or multi-person online collaborative office.
Intuitively, this goal is a bit beyond expectations, and is even more abstract than coin stocks. The latter only needs to be centralized, but the competitors of cloud services are AWS or Microsoft.
After reading the white paper, we can find the following facts:
1. Read performance bottleneck: paid read mechanism + Aptos storage SDK
2. Storage reliability: erasure coding mechanism + on-chain/off-chain hybrid audit
3. Economic sustainability → micropayment channel + on-chain rewards and penalties
More detailed explanation
• From cold storage to hot storage: Compared with Filecoin and Arweave, which focus on storing data, Shelby aims at reading data; • Clay erasure code reduces redundant backup: the more backups, the higher the security. Shelby takes an unusual approach and introduces an erasure code mechanism to reduce the main body backup to about 2 times; • Never put on the chain what can be off-chain: off-chain audit combined with on-chain verification, off-chain verification combined with on-chain truth-seeking, local cache combined with on-chain reading. Let's break it down below. Filecoin is essentially a mining disk. The $FIL economic model encourages miners to back up data frantically, so it eventually becomes a price comparison mechanism between hard disk price and $FIL. Everyone invests in the last hard disk before $FIL plummets.
The only difference between Filecoin and Ethereum is that Ethereum really has practical uses, but no B-side enterprise or individual uses Filecoin on a daily basis.
Arweave is the extreme opposite of Filecoin. Its economic model is "pay once, store forever". The core is that $AR must be released slowly enough to continuously stimulate miners not to delete data, but this fundamentally limits the scale of Arweave. The reason is simple. The more you store, the higher the maintenance cost, and it takes an extremely slow time to recover the cost.
The smartest thing about Shelby is to reduce the requirements for redundant backup, boldly reducing it to about 2x, which is highly close to the 1.2x of traditional AWS. At the same time, read behavior must be paid for, which is the source of income for the storage layer.
This is a normal commercial storage project, building an intermediary system to guide users to pay for use, but the stimulus of cryptocurrency will change all this.
In Jump's design, user storage, RPC nodes and payments will distort the original normal path. For example, users will still create useless storage in order to obtain potential $SHELBY tokens, provided that the potential expected airdrop will exceed the small payment viewing fee.
Unless everything is priced in U-standard, in which case it will face direct competition from AWS. Jump also said that AWS's MB daily storage cost is only $0.00000077 US dollars, and the reading cost is only $0.00002 per MB.
Considering that AWS is the cost after years of operation and has passed the early stage of losing money in exchange for market, it is hard to think that Web3 native storage projects can compete with it.
Fundamentally, Jump did not design a technical product as good as Firedancer. Although Solana has been questioned about its degree of centralization, it has maintained a decentralized appearance of 1000+ nodes. It is hard to imagine that Shelby will have the same amazing effect.
Conclusion
Sovereign individuals are a concept, and so are Public Goods. Only commercialization can talk about social responsibility.
It is politically incorrect for Web2 platforms to use user data for profit, but it is a path that must be taken in business. If you still remember the attention economy in the early days of the crypto world, you will definitely remember the combination of Brave browser and $BAT. In fact, the market share of the two is not even as good as Firefox.
Data requires scale effects, and the same is true for data storage products. Shelby's choice of Aptos will also have a problem. The main reason why NFT was criticized was that NFT was linked to Ethereum, and the NFT itself was in AWS. If the data of Ethereum products is on Shelby, then isn't this the same as Celestia?
Celestia was criticized by Vitalik and turned to support EigenLayer. So no public chain will allow its products to use Shelby. If it eventually becomes Aptos professional, it will be no different from Walrus on Sui.
In this way, Jump's delivery quality seems to make sense.
Davin
Catherine
Hui Xin
Clement
Joy
YouQuan