Why decentralized storage matters for Open Money

Decentralized storage enables data permanence, censorship resistance, and user control, which supports a resilient, trustless internet.

In a previous post we talked a lot about immutability and why it's one of the main value propositions of a decentralized blockchain. To summarized, immutability enables trustless transactions, censorship resistance, and verifiable records.

All good, but the next step on the path of building defensible and persistent systems is to create decentralized storage. The general idea is that decentralized storage ensures that the data supporting Open Money is as open, accessible, and resilient as the transactional networks themselves.

Blockchains excel at recording transactions, but they are not optimized for storing large amounts of data. If Open Money is to support a decentralized financial system, social networks, applications, and content archives, it requires storage solutions that are as decentralized as the networks they serve.

Traditional, centralized cloud providers are not enough—data stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud can be censored, altered, or lost. Open Money demands a permanent, permissionless, and tamper-proof way to store information.

Decentralized storage ensures that:

Data remains accessible regardless of platform shutdowns, government interference, or corporate policies.
Users control their own information, rather than relying on centralized providers who can revoke access at will.
The historical record remains verifiable and immutable, preventing the selective erasure of key data.

Decentralized storage networks distribute data across a peer-to-peer system rather than relying on a central server. When a user uploads a file, it is broken into encrypted fragments and stored on multiple nodes, ensuring redundancy and resilience. These networks typically use cryptographic proofs to verify that data remains intact over time without requiring trust in any single participant.

This model has several advantages:

Redundancy and fault tolerance – Because data is stored across multiple nodes, there is no single point of failure. Unlike centralized storage, where a server outage can cause data loss, decentralized storage ensures continuous availability.
Censorship resistance – Governments or corporations cannot unilaterally remove or block access to data stored across a decentralized network.
Economic incentives – Many decentralized storage networks reward users for providing storage capacity, creating a sustainable ecosystem that ensures data availability.

Decentralized storage and the permaweb

One of the most compelling use cases for decentralized storage is the concept of the permaweb, a permanent, censorship-resistant archive of information. The internet today is ephemeral—links break, content disappears, and platforms can remove information at will. Decentralized storage changes this dynamic by making data persistent and publicly verifiable.

Here's more context on this topic:

This concept has major implications for publishing, journalism, historical records, and even legal evidence. By leveraging decentralized storage, we can create an enduring digital archive that is accessible to all, free from the risk of deletion or manipulation.

For even more context:

Key decentralized storage networks

Arweave – A blockchain built specifically for permanent data storage, Arweave powers the "permaweb," an immutable, censorship-resistant archive of internet content. Every piece of data uploaded to Arweave is stored indefinitely with a one-time fee, making it ideal for archiving digital history.
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) – A peer-to-peer protocol that creates a distributed, versioned file system where data is accessed via unique cryptographic hashes rather than URLs. Unlike traditional web hosting, IPFS allows users to retrieve content from multiple sources, ensuring availability even if the original uploader goes offline.
Filecoin – A decentralized marketplace for cloud storage that incentivizes participants to provide storage capacity and verify the integrity of stored data. Filecoin allows users to rent out spare hard drive space, creating a decentralized alternative to traditional cloud storage providers.

Decentralized storage is the backbone of a truly open internet. Without it, Open Money remains reliant on centralized infrastructure that contradicts its core principles. As new protocols emerge and adoption increases, we move closer to a world where information is as free, permissionless, and permanent as the digital economies built upon it.

However, decentralized storage also raises questions. Should everything on the internet be permanent? While the permaweb offers immense value in preserving knowledge and history, it also challenges the notion of content revision and deletion. The internet thrives on iteration—information is updated, refined, and sometimes corrected. A permanent, immutable archive introduces ethical and practical dilemmas around misinformation, privacy, and digital permanence.

That said, the potential of decentralized storage far outweighs these concerns. As more individuals, businesses, and institutions recognize the importance of data sovereignty, decentralized storage will become a fundamental layer of Open Money—ensuring that the financial, social, and informational foundations of the digital world remain accessible, resilient, and truly decentralized.

This post is part of the Open Money Project, an ongoing series that forms the basis of a longer work. Subscribe to get a weekly update as it unfolds.