Degrees of Decentralized Freedom: Comparing Modern Decentralized Storage Platforms

Decentralized storage platforms distribute control across individual peers, thus reducing reliance on a single entity and mitigating common vulnerabilities of centralized storage systems. In this paper, we compare the architecture and operation of four popular decentralized storage platforms: IPFS, Filecoin, Swarm, and Storj. Our study reveals significant implementation differences in four key aspects: data routing, data persistence, incentivization mechanisms, and resource requirements. These architectural decisions directly influence network characteristics, performance metrics, and economic sustainability. We collect comprehensive snapshots of the entire network to analyze network properties including peer uptime, geographical distribution, and network availability. Our analysis shows that while IPFS maintains the largest user base, it exhibits the lowest peer uptime due to lack of incentivization, with 50% of peers online for less than 4 days. In contrast, incentivized platforms exhibited median peer uptimes around 80-96% of the study period. We found considerable performance variations that directly correlate with implementation choices. Storj, with its centralized data routing architecture, achieves performance nearly on par with centralized solutions like Google Drive. In contrast, Swarm showed the slowest performance metrics with its full commitment to decentralization. Finally, our analysis reveals that cryptocurrency price fluctuations significantly influence participation and cost, suggesting potential sustainability challenges in these decentralized storage platforms.