Jump emerges from the shadows to focus on storage, with an uncertain future for Aptos.
Long-time readers may remember that the third article published by this account was "Bodhi", a small tool oriented towards content based on the Arweave storage chain. Recently, Aptos launched its storage platform Shelby, which is comparable to AWS. The excitement surrounding this launch surpasses that of Filecoin/Arweave's transitions, and even the launches of Ton Storage, BNB GreenField, and Sui Walrus, because Shelby signifies the return of Jump Trading.
Jump Trading, which played a pivotal role in propelling SOL's early price, is the true founder of the Solana conspiracy group, the inventor of Solana 2.0 Firedancer, and the one who proclaimed that the speed of light is the limit, is making a comeback in the crypto space.
However, let's temper our expectations; this could be a return of a Jump conspiracy, a clichéd story of Aptos strongly countering Sui. From CZ to Jump, these once-renowned Big Names seem to have not escaped the law of mean reversion.
Jump's Return
Setting aside Shelby and Aptos, let's first discuss Jump's glorious track record or history of harvesting profits. Besides the previously mentioned SOL, the collapse of FTX and UST/Luna is also related to them.
Although they have multiple funds like Jump Crypto and Jump Capital, the core money-making machine is their market-making business, Jump Trading, comparable to Simons' prestigious fund. They are not only keen on making money but also actively develop and trade everything related.
During the FTX collapse, Jump was deeply embroiled in a public relations crisis, frequently facing investigations from the SEC, CFTC, and other departments. However, after Trump took office and adopted a "loose regulatory" or even deregulatory policy towards DeFi and cryptocurrencies, Jump paid their fines and started anew.
Shelby is their first major project focused on the underlying value of crypto after their return, which is different from mere investment. Referring to Sui's Walrus token launch path, if Shelby is indeed Jump's new project, it will undoubtedly spark a new wave in crypto.
If we are mistaken, it could be a business similar to Nansen's anti-witchcraft operations, merely a processing deal, just a business transaction. Interestingly, both Aptos and Sui are projects that Jump has invested in.
Heresy is more detestable than heretics.
After reviewing the Shelby white paper, I found that Shelby falls short of Jump's usual standards, resembling a "shelf product" aimed at Sui's walrus, merely a compilation of existing concepts.
Aptos and Sui, as twins of the Move ecosystem, consistently adhere to a strategy where they can be surpassed by ETH or SOL, but must not be outpaced by each other.
Shelf Product Shelby
Even if Jump is not what it once was, their moves are still remarkable. For instance, Shelby's goal is not merely to read small images but to achieve high-difficulty scenarios like 4K streaming, TB-level AI training data, or collaborative online work.
Intuitively, this goal seems somewhat beyond expectations, even more abstract than crypto stocks, which only require centralization. However, the competitors in cloud services are AWS or Microsoft.
After thoroughly reading the white paper, several facts can be identified:
1. Reading performance bottleneck: Paid reading mechanism + Aptos storage SDK
2. Storage reliability: Erasure coding mechanism + on-chain/off-chain hybrid auditing
3. Economic sustainability → Micro-payment channels + on-chain rewards and penalties
More detailed explanations
• Cold storage to hot storage: Compared to Filecoin and Arweave, which focus on storing data, Shelby targets reading data;
• Clay erasure coding reduces redundancy: The more backups, the higher the security. Shelby takes an unconventional route by introducing an erasure coding mechanism, reducing the required backups to about 2 times;
• Off-chain that absolutely does not go on-chain: Off-chain auditing combined with on-chain verification, off-chain validation combined with on-chain truth-seeking, local caching combined with on-chain reading
Image description: Comparison of Shelby and mainstream storage services
Image source: Shelby Whitepaper
Let's break it down further. Filecoin is essentially a mining machine scheme, and the $FIL economic model encourages miners to back up data frantically, ultimately turning into a price comparison mechanism between hard drives and $FIL, with everyone investing in hard drives before the $FIL crash.
The only difference between Filecoin and Ethereum is that Ethereum has real utility, while no B-end enterprises or individuals use Filecoin in their daily operations.
Arweave is the extreme opposite of Filecoin, with its economic model based on "one-time payment, permanent storage." The core is that $AR is released slowly enough to continuously incentivize miners not to delete data, but this fundamentally limits Arweave's scale. The reasoning is simple: the more data stored, the higher the maintenance costs, requiring an exceptionally slow time to break even.
The smartest aspect of Shelby is its bold reduction of redundancy backup requirements to around 2x, closely approaching the traditional AWS's 1.2x, while charging for reading actions as a source of income for the storage layer.
This is a normal commercial storage project, building a intermediary system to guide users to pay for usage, but the stimulating effect of cryptocurrency will change everything.
Image description: Shelby structure
Image source: @zuoyeweb3
In Jump's design, users' storage, RPC nodes, and payments will distort the original normal paths. For instance, users may still create useless storage to obtain potential $SHELBY tokens, provided that the anticipated airdrop exceeds the small payment viewing fees.
Unless everything is priced in U, then it would face direct competition with AWS. Jump has stated that AWS's daily storage cost per MB is only $0.00000077, and the reading cost is only $0.00002 per MB.
Considering that AWS has been operating for many years and has passed the early stage of loss-making to gain market share, it is hard to believe that a Web3 native storage project can compete with it.
Fundamentally, Jump has not designed a product as excellent as Firedancer. Although Solana has questions about its level of centralization, it maintains a decentralized appearance with over 1000 nodes. It is hard to imagine that Shelby will have the same stunning effect.
Conclusion
Sovereign individuals are an idea, and Public Goods are too; only commercialization can discuss social responsibility.
The issue of Web2 platforms profiting from user data is politically incorrect but a necessary path in business. If everyone remembers the early attention economy of the crypto world, they cannot forget the combination of the Brave browser and $BAT. In fact, neither of them even holds a market share comparable to Firefox.
Data requires economies of scale, and the same applies to storage data products. The choice of Aptos for Shelby also raises a question: the main reason NFTs were criticized back then was that NFT links were on Ethereum while the NFT entities were on AWS. If the data of Ethereum products is on Shelby, isn't that similar to Celestia?
Celestia has faced criticism from Vitalik and has turned to support EigenLayer, so no public chain would allow its products to use Shelby. If it ultimately becomes specialized in Aptos, it would indeed not differ much from Walrus on Sui.
In this way, Jump's delivery quality seems to make sense.
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