Many believe that general-purpose blockchains like Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, and Solana will come to power everything on the web, including financial apps, social apps, and even Amazon-like marketplaces. But there’s a show-stopping problem that’s being widely overlooked: on-chain storage.

While today's general-purpose blockchains have worked well for storage-light applications like DeFi, they cannot scale to handle storage-heavy applications like social apps and marketplaces. Imagine a world in which every ‘like’ or follow on a decentralized app cost $1.00+ in storage fees. Unfortunately, that is the reality now because of the storage limitations of all general-purpose blockchains on the market today.

The numbers don't lie. The simple table below illustrates how the cost of storing just 1 gigabyte of on-chain state varies across blockchains. Importantly, these costs are only expected to increase for general-purpose blockchains, as they become more popular and storage becomes more scarce. We will discuss DeSo as a special case later on.