Blockchain Storage Costs $200,000 Per Gigabyte and That’s Why Nobody Actually Builds On-Chain
Looked up what it costs to store data on Ethereum the other day. Roughly $200,000 per gigabyte. Solana’s cheaper but still thousands of dollars. That’s insane when AWS charges like $0.02 per gigabyte.
So obviously everyone just points their NFTs and dApps to centralized servers and calls it decentralized. Which completely misses the point because when that server goes offline or the company shuts down, your “blockchain” asset is just a broken link.
Vanar built their entire infrastructure around solving this exact problem. Their Neutron compression tech takes files and shrinks them 500 to 1 before storing them on-chain as these “Seeds” things. Suddenly storing actual data on blockchain becomes economically viable instead of impossibly expensive.
I’m seeing this play out with World of Dypians where 30,000+ players are running around in a fully on-chain game. Every action, every item, every game state lives on validators instead of AWS. If Vanar disappeared tomorrow, the game keeps existing because it’s truly decentralized.
That’s what Paramount Pictures and Legendary Entertainment are betting on too. They’re not partnering for fun, they’re looking at IP rights and digital ownership that can’t be taken away by a platform deciding to change their terms of service. When your movie franchise assets live on-chain, Disney can’t just delete them from their servers.
Williams Racing partnership makes sense from the same angle. Racing games, esports betting, fan engagement tokens.
They’re carbon-neutral through Google’s renewable energy which honestly just removes the “but blockchain wastes energy” objection that kills a lot of enterprise deals before they start.
What interests me is whether mainstream companies actually care enough about decentralization to pay for on-chain storage versus just using cheaper centralized options that work fine 99% of the time.