We don’t need more users; we need more stewards.
This is not a mantra I crafted in a boardroom. It is a confession I wrote in the margins of a journal during the autumn of 2022, sitting alone in a cabin in Yilan, watching the rain dissolve the silhouette of Terra’s collapse into mud. Back then, everything we called ‘infrastructure’ felt like a house of cards. Storage cycles, liquidity cycles, narrative cycles—they all bled into one another. The market was screaming that the storage cycle had topped. Filecoin had fallen 98% from its high. The whispers were everywhere: DePIN is dead. Data storage is a commodity. The cycle is over.
And then, quietly, a report emerged from Bank of America—a ‘psychological massage,’ as the traders call it—arguing that the fundamental thesis for decentralized storage had never been stronger.
I read the headlines. I felt the tension. The market sees a top. The bank sees a bottom. But both are looking at the wrong horizon.
--- ### Context: The Two Truths of a Cycle
The phrase ‘storage cycle’ has two meanings, and we keep conflating them.
One meaning is the price cycle—the speculative wave that lifts token prices during bull runs and drags them into the abyss during bear markets. By that measure, yes, the cycle topped in 2021. Filecoin’s FIL token reached $237 in April 2021; today it hovers around $5. That is a 98% drawdown. The same pattern holds for Siacoin, Arweave, and every other storage project that rode the DePIN narrative. The market looks at the chart, sees the descending peaks, and declares the story finished.
The other meaning is the fundamental cycle—the actual adoption, usage, and revenue generation of the network. Here, the data tells a different story. Total storage deals on Filecoin have grown from 1 EiB in early 2021 to over 20 EiB in 2025. The number of active storage providers has stabilized. Revenue from storage fees, while volatile, has a modest upward trend. Sia’s network similarly shows consistent growth in storage utilization, even as token prices languish.
Bank of America’s report is an attempt to bridge these two cycles. They look at the fundamental cycle and argue that the market’s pessimism is overdone. The ‘psychological massage’ is their way of saying: You’re pricing in a death that hasn’t happened.
I understand the impulse. I also understand why it might be wrong.
--- ### Core: The Data from the Trenches
Let me share what I have seen, not from a terminal, but from the trenches of community building.
When I founded The Alignment Circle in 2024, I spent weeks listening to builders who were trying to deploy applications on Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM). Their biggest frustration was not token price. It was the gap between the promise of decentralized storage and the user experience of actually storing data. They wanted to store NFT metadata, AI training sets, and even compliance documents for RWA projects. But the onboarding friction was high. The gas fees for storage transactions, while low relative to Ethereum, were still confusing for non-native users.
Yet, they kept building. Why? Because the fundamental demand for censorship-resistant, verifiable storage is real. It is not a narrative—it is a need. I saw this firsthand when I audited the tokenomics of a DeFi protocol in 2025. The protocol needed to store historical price data for regulatory reporting. They considered AWS, but the auditors required proof that the data had not been tampered with. Decentralized storage became a compliance necessity, not a speculative bet.
This is the part Bank of America gets right. The unit economics of decentralized storage are improving. Filecoin’s storage fees now cover a larger share of miner rewards than they did two years ago. The network is transitioning from a purely subsidy-driven model to one where actual usage generates meaningful revenue. That is a fundamental shift.
But there is a subtlety the report likely glosses over. The ‘storage cycle’ that has topped is not the cycle of usage—it is the cycle of miner profitability. The early days of Filecoin were defined by massive token emissions that rewarded miners disproportionately. Those days are ending. The block reward schedule is linear, but the value of those rewards has collapsed. Miners who bought hardware at $200/TiB now see their marginal costs exceed their marginal revenue. They are dropping out, and hashrate is declining.
This is not necessarily a death knell. It is a consolidation. The miners who remain are the ones who have access to cheap energy, who have diversified into retrieval markets, who have built relationships with enterprise clients. They are the stewards, not the speculators. And that is exactly who we need.
I remember the 2017 ICO boom, when I audited the whitepaper of a project called OmniChain. The tokenomics looked beautiful on paper, but the distribution heavily favored insiders. When the rug pulled, I learned that a protocol’s value is not in its code—it is in the alignment of its participants. Storage protocols are no different. The cycle that has topped is the cycle of speculators; the cycle that is beginning is the cycle of stewards.
Bank of America’s analysis may be correct in aggregate, but it misses the granular reality: the next phase of decentralized storage will not be measured by token price, but by the resilience of the network’s community. And that requires more than a bank’s endorsement.
--- ### Contrarian: The Trap of Institutional Validation
Here is the contrarian angle that keeps me awake at night.
Bank of America is not a charity. They published that report because they see an opportunity for their clients. The ‘psychological massage’ is designed to create a narrative shift that will allow institutional capital to accumulate at low prices. That is fine—markets need participants. But the moment we outsource our conviction to a traditional bank, we betray the very ethos of decentralization.
I saw this dynamic play out in real time after the Bitcoin ETF approval. Institutions flooded in, but they did not buy Bitcoin to use it as peer-to-peer cash. They bought it as a macro hedge. Satoshi’s vision was buried under Wall Street’s balance sheets. The same thing can happen to storage. If Bank of America’s report triggers a wave of speculative buying, the price might rise, but the fundamental alignment degrades. Traders do not care about storage deals; they care about exit liquidity.
Moreover, the report ignores the biggest elephant in the room: U.S. regulatory risk. The SEC has not explicitly declared Filecoin or Sia a security, but the threat remains. If the SEC were to pursue enforcement actions, the institutional flows would reverse overnight, and the ‘fundamental strength’ would be irrelevant. Bank of America is not going to highlight that risk in their report because it undermines their bullish thesis.
Trust is the only protocol that cannot be coded. And trust in a bank’s analysis is fragile.
But the deeper issue is epistemological. Bank of America is using traditional finance metrics—revenue, earnings, growth rate—to evaluate a protocol that was designed to be anticapitalist. The entire premise of decentralized storage is to create a market that is not controlled by any single entity. Measuring its success by P/E ratios is like grading a fish on its ability to climb a tree. The real value of Filecoin is not the revenue it generates today; it is the option value of a future where data cannot be censored, where AI models are trained on immutable datasets, where sovereign individuals can store their identity without permission.
That value cannot be captured in a quarterly report. It can only be lived by those who choose to steward the network.
--- ### Takeaway: The Valley is Where We Build
We built not for the peak, but for the valley.
I wrote that line in my journal after losing a third of my net worth in the 2022 crash. It felt like a consolation prize then. Now I see it as a strategic truth. The storage cycle that is ‘topping’ is the false peak of speculation. The real cycle—the one that will span decades—is just beginning. It will be built by stewards who run nodes, who write contracts, who deploy on FVM, who refuse to let the noise of token prices distract them from the signal of genuine utility.
Bank of America’s report is a useful data point, but it is not a revelation. The fundamental strength of decentralized storage has always been there, hiding in plain sight: in the 20 EiB of data already stored, in the thousands of nodes running across the globe, in the developers who stubbornly believe that data ownership is a human right.
The market can call a top. The institutions can massage the psychology. But the protocols will endure because they are not built for the chart—they are built for the soul.
So I will keep building. Not for the peak. For the valley.
And I will keep asking: are you a user, or are you a steward?
