Storage Arena is a live benchmark of the major storage networks. Upload one file and watch each one handle it in real time — the steps it takes, how fast it is, and where your bytes actually end up. Don’t want to upload anything? Replay the recorded averages instead.

It puts four backends side by side: Tapedrive (Solana-native, erasure-coded object storage), Walrus (cheap large blobs on Sui), IPFS (content addressing, with Filecoin as the incentive layer underneath), and S3 — here, Cloudflare R2 over the S3 API, standing in as the centralized baseline.

The point isn’t really speed. It’s that “successful upload” means something different on each one. S3 is done when one company returns an HTTP 200. IPFS is done when a CID exists and at least one node pins it — with no promise it stays online. Walrus is done when a quorum holds the slivers and an availability certificate is issued on Sui. Tapedrive is done when the tape is finalized on Solana and a staked node group holds the shards. Same word, four different trust events. The Arena makes each step concrete, down to the real receipt you can open on the relevant explorer.

why I built it

I’m building Moment, and Moment has to put data somewhere. The easy answer is an S3 bucket — but then the data lives inside one company’s account, closeable, never really yours. I’ve written about why that matters: if the goal is data people actually own, the storage layer is where that’s won or lost.

So before committing to anything, I wanted to feel the trade-offs instead of reading a comparison table. Storage Arena is that research, made interactive — and it’s why I keep coming back to Tapedrive, whose pay-once, erasure-coded, Solana-native model is the closest shape to what Moment needs.

It’ll go out of date fast as these networks move from testnet to mainnet. That’s part of the point — it’s a snapshot of a layer that’s still being built.