Jump and Shelby Make a Comeback: The "Light-Speed Ambition" in the Storage Track and the AWS Predicament

Old Deng can only go crazy once.

Long-time readers may remember that the third article published by this account was titled "Bodhi," a content-oriented tool based on the Arweave storage chain. Recently, Aptos launched its storage platform Shelby, which competes with AWS. The launch of tokens from Filecoin/Arweave, or even Ton Storage, BNB GreenField, and Sui Walurs, has not excited people as much, because Shelby signifies the return of Jump Trading.

The early price of SOL was supported by a single hand, the true founder with a Solana conspiracy group temperament, the inventor of Solana 2.0 Firedancer, and that crazy Jump Trading, which proclaimed that the speed of light is the limit, has returned to the crypto world.

However, lower your expectations first; this could be a return of the Jump conspiracy, with Aptos strongly countering the clichéd story of Sui. From CZ to Jump, these once-renowned Big Names seem to have not escaped the law of mean reversion.

Jump Return

Let's not talk about Shelby and Aptos for now, but rather about Jump's glorious achievements or its history of exploiting investors. Besides the previously mentioned SOL, the collapse of FTX and UST/Luna is also related to it.

Although it has multiple funds such as Jump Crypto and Jump Capital, the core money printing machine is its market-making business, Jump Trading, which is comparable to Simons' Medalist fund. Not only is it keen on making money, but it is also actively developing and trading everything related.

Jump was deeply mired in a public relations crisis during the FTX collapse, frequently facing investigations from agencies such as the SEC and CFTC. However, after Trump took office, the approach towards DeFi and cryptocurrencies shifted to a "looser regulatory" or even deregulatory policy, allowing Jump to start anew after paying fines.

Shelby is the first major project that focuses on the underlying value of cryptocurrency after its emergence, which is different from pure investment. Referring to Sui's Walrus token issuance route, if Shelby is indeed Jump's new project, it will undoubtedly create a new wave in the cryptocurrency space.

If guessed wrong, then it would be similar to Nansen's anti-witchcraft business, just a processing job, merely a business transaction. Interestingly, both Aptos and Sui are investment projects of Jump.

Heresy is more detestable than heretics.

After reading the Shelby white paper, I found that Shelby has lost the consistent standard of Jump and is more like a "shelf product" that targets Sui's walrus, merely a patchwork of existing concepts.

Aptos and Sui, as twins of the Move system, consistently adhere to the strategy that they can be surpassed by ETH or SOL, but must not be outpaced by each other.

Shelf Product Shelby

Jump, even if it is not the same as it once was, still stands out when it comes to execution. For example, Shelby's goal is not just to simply read small images, but to achieve high-difficulty scenarios like 4K streaming, TB-level AI training data, or multi-user online collaborative work.

Intuitively, this goal is somewhat beyond expectations, even more abstract than securities, which only require centralization, but the competitors in cloud services are AWS or Microsoft.

After reading the white paper, the following facts can be found:

1. Reading Performance Bottlenecks: Pay-per-read Mechanism + Aptos Storage SDK

2. Storage reliability: Erasure coding mechanism + on-chain/off-chain hybrid audit

3. Economic sustainability → Micro-payment channels + On-chain rewards and penalties

More detailed explanation

• Cold storage to hot storage: Compared to Filecoin and Arweave, which focus on storing data, Shelby aims at reading data;

• Clay erasure coding reduces redundancy backups: The more backups, the higher the security. Shelby takes an unconventional approach by introducing erasure coding mechanisms, reducing the body backups to about 2 times.

• Off-chain that absolutely does not go on-chain: off-chain auditing combined with on-chain verification, off-chain authentication 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 down the following: Filecoin is essentially a mining machine disk, and the $FIL economic model encourages miners to crazily back up data. Therefore, it ultimately becomes a price comparison mechanism between hard drive prices and $FIL, with everyone investing in the last hard drives before the $FIL crash.

The only difference between Filecoin and Ethereum is that Ethereum actually has practical uses, but no B-end enterprises or individuals use Filecoin in their daily lives.

Arweave is the extreme opposite of Filecoin, with its economic model based on "one-time payment, permanent storage". The core principle is that the release of $AR must be slow enough to continuously incentivize miners not to delete data. However, this fundamentally limits Arweave's scalability. The reasoning is simple: the more data stored, the higher the maintenance costs, requiring an exceptionally slow time to break even.

The smartest thing about Shelby is to reduce the redundancy backup requirements boldly down to around 2x, which is very close to the traditional AWS's 1.2x, while charging for read operations as a source of revenue for the storage layer.

This is a normal commercial storage project, building an 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 the design of Jump, users' storage, RPC nodes, and payments will distort the originally normal path. For example, users will still create useless storage to obtain potential $SHELBY tokens, provided that the expected airdrop will exceed the small payment viewing fees.

Unless everything is priced in U-based currency, then we have to face direct competition with AWS. Jump also mentioned that AWS's daily storage cost is only $0.00000077 per MB, and the reading cost is only $0.00002 per MB.

Considering that AWS has been operational for many years and has passed the early stage of losing money to gain market share, it is hard to believe that Web3 native storage projects can compete with it.

Ultimately, Jump has not designed a technology-oriented product as excellent as Firedancer. Although there are questions about the degree of centralization in Solana, it has maintained a decentralized appearance with over 1000 nodes, making it hard to imagine that Shelby would have the same stunning effect.

Conclusion

Sovereign individuals are a concept, and so are Public Goods; only by commercializing can social responsibility be discussed.

The issue of Web2 platforms profiting from user data is politically incorrect but a necessary path in business. If everyone remembers the attention economy in the early days of the crypto world, they certainly cannot forget the combination of the Brave browser and $BAT. In fact, together they have even less market share than Firefox.

Data requires economies of scale, and the same applies to data storage products. Shelby's choice of Aptos may also pose a problem; the main reason NFTs were criticized back in the day was that the NFT links were on Ethereum, while the body of the NFT was on AWS. If the data of Ethereum products is on Shelby, isn't that the same as Celestia?

Celestia has already faced criticism from Vitalik, and by supporting EigenLayer, no public chain will allow its products to use Shelby. If it ultimately becomes a specialty of Aptos, it indeed bears little difference from Walrus on Sui.

In this way, it makes sense that the delivery quality of Jump is also understandable.