Decentralized storage has been promoted for years, but only a few have truly stood the test. Filecoin sustains its entire network ecosystem through miner incentives, while Arweave differentiates itself with permanent storage. The problem is, everyone who has used them knows—both have their issues. Filecoin’s retrieval speed is painfully slow, and Arweave’s costs are so high that wallets tremble.

At this moment, a new player claims they have the RedStuff algorithm, which is fast, cheap, and reliable. Many people's first reaction is that this must be boasting—after all, erasure coding technology isn't exactly new. Why should you do better than others?

The core difference actually lies in the "two-dimensional" concept. Traditional erasure codes, including Reed-Solomon used by Filecoin, are essentially one-dimensional. Data is divided into chunks along a single line, then redundant chunks are generated. To recover data, you need to collect enough chunks to piece it together. This works fine in static environments, but in decentralized networks, it’s awkward—nodes come online and go offline at any time, network latency fluctuates, and one-dimensional erasure codes become particularly cumbersome.

The two-dimensional design is completely different. Data is arranged into a matrix, with rows and columns each encoded with erasure codes. The benefits are significant. During data recovery, the number of communication rounds can be greatly reduced. For example, a 100×100 matrix, if a piece of data is lost, a one-dimensional code would need to collect 100 fragments from 100 different places to recover it. The two-dimensional code only needs to collect a portion from the corresponding row and column, possibly just 20 fragments. In real network environments, this means speeds can be increased several times, even tenfold.