We often call blockchain the trust machine, but the reality might be more sobering than you imagine — the NFTs, DApp interfaces you interact with, and the so-called "immutable" on-chain certificates, in fact, over 90% of the data are stored on some centralized servers.

What is truly stored on-chain is often just an address indicating "where the data is."

It's like you have a property deed, but the house itself is built on someone else's land. If the server crashes, content is deleted, or the company disappears, your so-called "digital asset" becomes a blank check.

This is not a technical bug; it is the fundamental contradiction of the entire decentralization ideal.

Now, some projects are trying to break this deadlock, aiming to build a truly decentralized data infrastructure for blockchain. They avoid touching smart contracts or running yield farms, focusing solely on one thing: making massive data sets (AI training data, 4K videos, application code) verifiable, traceable, and censorship-resistant, just like Bitcoin.

How do they do it? The approach is actually quite clever:

**Step 1: Data does not go on-chain**
Transactions handle transaction processing, and high-speed blockchains like Sui continue doing what they excel at — recording ownership and handling interactions. The data itself is sliced and encrypted using erasure coding techniques, dispersed across a global network of nodes.

**Step 2: The chain becomes a notary**
The on-chain data does not store the data itself, only "data fingerprints," commitments from storage nodes, and real-time proofs of availability. Any application can verify data integrity and accessibility at any time.

**Step 3: Data becomes programmable**
Storage and retrieval are no longer black boxes; applications can combine different data sources to create new value. This is what a decentralized infrastructure should look like.