A lot of people are criticizing $FIL for one reason—it’s dropped almost 200x from its peak.

But does that logic really hold up?

When FIL took off back in the day, it benefited from both a concept boom and bull market frenzy—a double buff. Of course the bubble was huge. The current crash is essentially the result of the bubble bursting, plus the short-term difficulty in landing storage applications, leading to a knee-jerk correction. It’s normal.

But there’s one thing you can’t ignore: in the last cycle, FIL has firmly established itself as the “leader in decentralized storage.”

Looking ahead, the storage track will definitely be a necessity. Why?

Because of AI.

China and the US are both going all-in on AI. There are two core factors behind this: energy and computing power. China lacks chips, so computing power can’t keep up, making AI progress slower; the US has enough computing power, but can’t support the energy demand—if this isn’t solved, they’ll eventually be overtaken. That’s why you see Trump making AI a national strategy, and Musk putting solar panels on Starlink to prepare for space-based electricity—they’re all aiming at this.

But the bottleneck of computing power and energy is only temporary. Once it’s broken through, both China and the US will face the same new problem: not enough storage.

AI is built on large models. The more complete the model, the more diverse and vast the data fed into it, the stronger the AI becomes. Jack Ma went all in on Alibaba Cloud for exactly this reason—when AI reaches the endgame, storage will inevitably be in short supply.

Cryptocurrency and AI both fundamentally rely on computing power. They don’t conflict; in fact, there’s even an AI track on-chain, with $TAO as the representative. Right now, TAO, just like real-world AI, is still in the conceptual stage and hasn’t truly landed. But as soon as Musk and co. achieve a breakthrough in AI, and the AI era truly arrives, on-chain will leap from web3 to web4.

Web4 will definitely be the age of AI. So no matter how things go, storage is unavoidable, and FIL is the essential need.

So why is it FIL and not $AR?

Simple: FIL is cloud storage. The concept is bigger, the market is broader, the capacity is deeper—just like Alibaba Cloud, it’s a trillion-dollar market.

But that doesn’t mean AR isn’t important. On the contrary, AR is just as important as FIL. AR is actual storage, with smaller capacity—like a library, it can’t fit a trillion-dollar market, but it’s indispensable.

As long as AI is the future, both FIL and AR are necessities—they’ll both take off.