Jump Trading Returns: Is the Storage Track a False Proposition?
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Jump Trading Returns: Is the Storage Track a False Proposition?
An old man can only go wild once.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Zuo Yaweishan
Long-time readers may recall that the third article ever published on this account was "Bodhi", a content-oriented tool built on the Arweave storage chain. Recently, Aptos launched Shelby, a storage platform positioned as a competitor to AWS. This has generated more excitement than the launches—or even token listings—of projects like Filecoin/Arweave, Ton Storage, BNB Greenfield, or Sui Walrus, because Shelby signals the return of Jump Trading.
The same firm that propped up SOL’s early price, laid the foundation for Solana’s shadowy cabal-like reputation, invented Solana 2.0 Firedancer, and boldly declared that "the speed of light is the only limit"—the relentless, money-printing machine known as Jump Trading—is back in crypto.
But let's temper expectations. This might just be another tale of a Jump-led conspiracy, with Aptos aggressively countering Sui—a cliché narrative at best. From CZ to Jump, these once-dominant big names seem unable to escape the law of mean reversion.
Jump’s Return
Regardless of Shelby or Aptos, let’s first revisit Jump’s glorious (or controversial) history. Beyond its early role in boosting SOL, Jump was also deeply entangled in the collapses of FTX and UST/Luna.
Though it operates multiple funds including Jump Crypto and Jump Capital, its core money-making engine remains Jump Trading—the market-making arm—akin to Jim Simons’ Medallion Fund. It doesn’t just chase profits; it actively builds and innovates around trading infrastructure.
Jump faced intense scrutiny and regulatory investigations from bodies like the SEC and CFTC during the FTX collapse. However, following Trump’s political resurgence and the subsequent shift toward “light-touch” or even deregulatory policies on DeFi and crypto, Jump paid its fines and reemerged.
Shelby marks its first major move post-comeback—one focused squarely on foundational crypto infrastructure rather than mere investment. Unlike speculative bets, this resembles a strategic play. Compare it to Sui’s Walrus token launch path: if Shelby is indeed a new flagship project orchestrated by Jump, it could ignite a fresh wave in crypto.
If not, then it’s merely another business venture—perhaps similar to Nansen’s anti-Sybil services—just another product assembled from existing components. Interestingly, both Aptos and Sui are portfolio companies of Jump.
Heresy is more threatening than heretics.
After reading the Shelby whitepaper, I found it underwhelming—beneath Jump’s usual standard. It feels less like a breakthrough and more like a shelf-ready product designed to counter Sui’s Walrus, cobbled together from existing concepts.
Aptos and Sui, the twin offspring of the Move language ecosystem, have always adhered to one principle: they can be surpassed by ETH or SOL, but never by each other.
Shelby: A Shelf-Ready Product
Even if Jump isn’t what it once was, its moves still carry weight. Shelby isn't aiming simply at serving small images—it targets high-demand use cases like 4K streaming, TB-scale AI training datasets, or real-time collaborative office tools.
Intuitively, this goal seems overly ambitious—more abstract than even meme coins. While meme coins only require centralization, competing in cloud storage means going head-to-head with AWS or Microsoft.
After reviewing the whitepaper, several key points emerge:
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Reading performance bottleneck: Pay-per-read mechanism + Aptos Storage SDK
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Storage reliability: Erasure coding + on-chain/off-chain hybrid auditing
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Economic sustainability → Micropayment channels + on-chain incentives and penalties
More detailed breakdown:
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Cold storage to hot storage: Unlike Filecoin or Arweave, which emphasize data preservation, Shelby focuses on data retrieval;
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Clay erasure coding to reduce redundancy: Most systems increase redundancy for security, but Shelby takes an unconventional approach—using erasure coding to cut baseline replication down to ~2x;
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Keep everything off-chain unless absolutely necessary: Off-chain auditing with on-chain verification, off-chain validation with on-chain truth-checking, local caching combined with on-chain reads
Image caption: Comparison between Shelby and mainstream storage services
Source: Shelby Whitepaper
To break it down further: Filecoin is essentially a hard drive marketplace. Its $FIL economic model incentivizes miners to replicate data excessively, turning it into a race between hard disk prices and $FIL valuation—everyone rushes to deploy drives before $FIL crashes.
The only difference between Filecoin and Ethereum is that Ethereum actually has real-world utility, whereas no enterprise or individual uses Filecoin in daily operations.
Arweave is Filecoin’s polar opposite. Its economic model relies on “pay once, store forever,” where $AR emissions must be slow enough to continuously motivate miners not to delete data. But this inherently limits Arweave’s scalability: the more you store, the higher maintenance costs become, requiring extremely long payback periods.
Shelby’s smartest move is reducing redundancy requirements—boldly cutting replication down to ~2x, close to traditional AWS levels (~1.2x)—while introducing pay-per-read to generate revenue for the storage layer.
This makes it resemble a conventional commercial storage business: build an intermediary system and charge users. But the addition of crypto incentives changes everything.
Image caption: Shelby architecture
Source: @zuoyeweb3
In Jump’s design, user behavior around storage, RPC nodes, and payments will distort normal usage patterns. Users might generate useless storage purely in hopes of a potential $SHELBY airdrop—if expected rewards outweigh minor read fees.
Unless everything is priced in USD terms, direct competition with AWS becomes inevitable. Jump itself notes that AWS charges just $0.00000077 per MB per day for storage and $0.00002 per MB for retrieval.
Considering AWS benefits from years of operational efficiency and has long passed the loss-leading growth phase, it’s hard to imagine any Web3-native storage project competing on cost.
Ultimately, Jump hasn’t delivered a technically groundbreaking product like Firedancer. While Solana faces criticism over centralization, it maintains a decentralized appearance with over 1,000 nodes. It’s difficult to expect Shelby to achieve anything similarly impressive.
Conclusion
Sovereign individuals are an ideal. Public goods are too. But only commercialization enables social responsibility.
It’s politically unpopular to acknowledge that Web2 platforms profit from user data—but commercially, it’s unavoidable. If you remember the attention economy of early crypto, you’ll recall Brave browser and $BAT. Yet, ironically, they’ve failed to capture even Firefox’s market share.
Data requires network effects. So do data storage products. Shelby’s choice of Aptos raises concerns: one major critique of NFTs was that while the token lived on Ethereum, the actual asset resided on AWS. If Ethereum-based apps now store data on Shelby, isn’t that just like Celestia?
Celestia faced backlash from Vitalik, prompting him to back EigenLayer instead. No public blockchain will likely allow its applications to rely on Shelby. If it ends up being exclusively used within Aptos, then truly, it’s no different from Walrus on Sui.
In that case, Jump’s deliverable quality starts to make sense.
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