Lens Chain’s Grove vs EthStorage: A 7-Dimensional Comparison of Decentralized Storage Solutions

TL;DR: Lens Chain (@LC) launched its mainnet with a new decentralized storage solution called Grove, which uses blockchain verification for content ownership while keeping actual data off-chain to achieve Web2-like performance and cost. EthStorage, by contrast, is an Ethereum Layer-2 storage solution that leverages Ethereum’s data availability layer to greatly expand on-chain data capacity. Both solutions support full CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations on stored data, but they take fundamentally different architectural approaches. This article compares Grove and EthStorage across seven key dimensions: index layer, storage layer, access control, storage incentives, decentralization & permissionless access, engineering complexity, and storage cost.

Summary Comparison

The table below summarizes the key differences between Grove (Lens Chain) and EthStorage at a glance:

1. Index Layer

Grove: The index layer in Grove is handled by an off-chain service called Lens Link. This microservice maintains a key–value mapping where each content item has a globally unique immutable key that maps to the content’s hash in the storage layer. In practice, Lens Link uses a centralized database to map each key to an immutable IPFS content identifier (CID) on the Lens IPFS network. When a user updates a piece of content, the key remains the same, but the stored CID (the value) is updated to the new content’s hash. This design provides a stable identifier for mutable content.

Currently, Lens Link is centralized under Lens Labs’ control. The team is actively working on a new iteration that will use a distributed key-value store and peer-to-peer broadcasting to improve performance and decentralization. Overall, Grove’s index is managed off-chain by Lens — this eliminates on-chain storage costs for metadata but means users must trust Lens’s infrastructure (with plans to gradually decentralize it in the future).

EthStorage: In EthStorage, the index layer is implemented on-chain via an Ethereum smart contract that serves as the entry point for all data operations. This storage contract provides a programmable key-value interface; for example, a function like putBlob(key, data) can be called to write data associated with a given key. The mapping from keys to data hashes is maintained within Ethereum’s state. Every create, update, or delete operation is a transaction on Ethereum, and the blockchain itself becomes the source of truth for the index. Unlike Grove’s off-chain index, EthStorage’s index is fully decentralized and tamper-proof by virtue of being on-chain. The trade-off is that writing to this index incurs gas costs. In summary, EthStorage treats the blockchain as the database for tracking where data is and who controls it, providing strong consistency and global availability of the index at the cost of higher transaction fees.

2. Storage Layer

Grove: Grove’s actual data is stored off-chain on a private cluster of IPFS nodes operated by Lens Labs. This controlled IPFS network ensures data persistence and integrity by storing content addressed by its hash (CID) and replicating it across multiple nodes for reliability. Since the IPFS network is private, unauthorized peers cannot join; effectively, only Lens’s nodes are storing the data at present, giving Lens direct control over data availability. To enhance performance, Lens has added caching and global edge delivery so that frequently accessed content can be served with very low latency (reported as fast as ~30 ms globally). In summary, Grove uses an off-chain IPFS-based storage network under Lens’s management: data can be delivered quickly and cheaply, but the storage infrastructure is centralized under a single provider’s control (with plans to open it up to more participants over time).

EthStorage: EthStorage’s storage layer is a decentralized network of nodes run by independent storage providers. Anyone can run an EthStorage node and join the network to contribute storage capacity. These nodes connect via peer-to-peer communication to form a distributed storage system. When data is uploaded through the EthStorage smart contract, it is propagated to these off-chain storage nodes. To ensure the data remains available and unaltered, nodes must periodically produce cryptographic proofs (proof-of-storage) that they still hold the data; these proofs are verified by the Ethereum contract. Because the network is permissionless, no single party controls the content — typically multiple nodes will hold copies of each piece of data, and new nodes can join to increase redundancy. In essence, EthStorage functions like a decentralized storage network tightly coupled with Ethereum: content lives on many community-run nodes, and the blockchain consensus guarantees agreement on what data should exist, providing resilience and trustlessness.

3. Access Control

Grove: Grove implements a flexible access control layer (ACL) that allows content owners to define who can modify or delete their data. When uploading content, a user can attach an ACL template specifying conditions (e.g., which addresses or groups are allowed to make changes). Any future modification or deletion of that content must go through Grove’s off-chain validation process. First, the user must prove their identity by signing a challenge with their wallet’s private key — this is handled by a Challenge Validator service. The signed challenge is verified (and recorded immutably on IPFS) to ensure the request indeed comes from the content owner or an authorized party. Next, an ACL Validator service checks the user’s address against the ACL rules to see if the operation is permitted. If authorized, the change is executed; if not, the action is rejected. All of these checks happen off-chain on Lens’s infrastructure, but they rely on cryptographic signatures tied to on-chain identities.

EthStorage: In EthStorage, access control is enforced entirely by on-chain logic within the storage smart contract. Since the contract manages the key-value store, it can define which Ethereum account is allowed to update or delete the data for a given key. This on-chain approach has the benefit of simplicity and transparency — there’s no off-chain permission service that could be a point of failure or trust. All rules are baked into the contract and enforced by Ethereum’s consensus. In short, EthStorage’s access control piggybacks on Ethereum’s security model: authorization is guaranteed by the blockchain, and only the proper key owners can perform restricted operations.

4. Storage Incentive

Grove: As of now, Grove does not have a public incentivization mechanism for storage providers. The off-chain storage nodes (the IPFS cluster) are run entirely by Lens Labs, with no token or reward system for third-party operators. In the absence of a reward scheme, Grove operates more like a traditional cloud service maintained by Lens. Users are not required to deal with any crypto-economic complexity (there are no storage payments or miners); they simply use the storage features as provided by the Lens ecosystem. This has the benefit of simplicity for the user and allows Lens to optimize costs internally. However, the lack of incentives means there is no economic motivation for independent nodes to participate in storing data. Data availability and durability currently depend solely on Lens’s capacity and continued willingness to operate the service. The Lens team has indicated interest in further decentralizing Grove in the future, which could include introducing incentives. But at present, Grove’s model remains incentive-less, with all responsibility on the core team.

EthStorage: EthStorage is designed with a built-in incentive model to ensure data is stored reliably over the long term. When a user writes data via the EthStorage contract, they must pay a one-time permanent storage fee (in ETH) proportional to the size of the data. This fee is held by the contract and is gradually distributed to storage providers as compensation for continuously holding the data. EthStorage implements a Proof-of-Storage mechanism: storage nodes periodically submit cryptographic proofs to the contract to prove they still retain the data. The contract verifies these proofs (using techniques like random sampling and succinct cryptographic proofs, e.g., SNARKs) and releases portions of the locked funds as rewards to providers who successfully prove data availability.

If a provider fails to submit proof or goes offline, they simply stop receiving rewards; the remaining locked funds are still available to any other node that can provide the required proofs for that data. This means even if the original host drops out, other nodes are financially incentivized to pick up the data and start earning the reward, thereby maintaining persistence. This economic design creates a self-sustaining permanence: an upfront payment by the user guarantees that there will always be a reward pool attracting someone to store the data. The key point is that EthStorage aligns economic incentives with data durability: users pay for perpetual storage once, and a competitive network of nodes is rewarded over time for keeping that data alive.

5. Decentralization and Permissionless

Grove: In its initial form, Grove relies on Lens’s own infrastructure at almost every layer, which makes the system largely centralized and permissioned. The Lens Link index is a centralized service; the IPFS storage nodes are privately operated; and the access control validation happens on Lens’s servers. No external entity today can run a full independent “Grove node” or participate in storing data, meaning the network is essentially closed and under the control of Lens Labs. This setup has some advantages in terms of performance and coordinated updates, but it raises decentralization concerns: users must trust Lens to keep the service running and not censor or lose data.

The Lens team acknowledges these limitations and has a long-term vision of making Grove fully decentralized. Steps toward that goal include decentralizing the index layer (e.g., replacing Lens Link with a distributed network) and eventually allowing third parties to run storage nodes that join the Grove network. Until those changes happen, Grove can be described as a “semi-decentralized” storage solution: it uses decentralized technologies under the hood (blockchain for verification, content-addressing via IPFS), but within a framework operated by a single entity. The permissionless aspect is missing in the current version, though the roadmap aims to progressively open the system.

EthStorage: EthStorage was built to be fully decentralized and permissionless from day one. Its architecture ensures that no single party or company has control over the index or the storage of data. Anyone can join as a storage provider without needing approval, and anyone can use the service by interacting with the public smart contract. Data availability is maintained by the collective efforts of many nodes plus Ethereum’s own consensus on the index. All the critical components are either on-chain or open source: the storage contract lives on Ethereum (transparent and secured by the network), and the node software is publicly available for anyone to run. This openness yields strong censorship resistance — so long as at least one honest node in the world continues to store a given piece of data and submit proofs, that data remains available and retrievable to users.

In summary, EthStorage embodies decentralization at both the index layer (a smart contract on a decentralized blockchain) and the storage layer (a distributed set of data nodes). Users of EthStorage do not have to trust any company or central server for their data; trust is placed in code, cryptography, and the broad community of node operators who are economically motivated to preserve the data. The system inherits Ethereum’s security guarantees and censorship resistance, aligning with the ethos of open, permissionless blockchain networks.

6. Engineering Complexity

Grove: The Grove architecture consists of multiple custom-built components, which introduce significant engineering complexity. The Lens team had to develop and now maintains various off-chain services (such as the Lens Link key-value index, challenge/ACL validators, storage APIs) and ensure they all interoperate correctly with the blockchain. Additionally, since these components run off-chain on Lens’s servers, Lens must provide high availability and consistency, approaching the reliability expectations users have of decentralized systems.

This layered design does give Grove some flexibility and performance benefits (Lens can optimize or update components independently and use fast databases for lookups), but it comes at the cost of a heavy implementation and maintenance burden. There are many moving pieces that need to work together seamlessly, and only a dedicated team like Lens Labs can presently operate this infrastructure. If and when the team pushes more of these components to decentralize, the complexity could increase further, as those services would need to function in distributed environments. In short, Grove’s rich feature set and off-chain optimizations are achieved at the expense of a complex, multi-component system that is challenging to build and run.

EthStorage: EthStorage takes a more streamlined approach by leveraging Ethereum’s existing infrastructure for most of its functionality. The core components of EthStorage are just the on-chain storage contract and the EthStorage node software. There is no separate indexing service or off-chain authorization server — those roles are filled by Ethereum itself (the blockchain provides a global ledger and account-based access control). This significantly reduces the number of new pieces that the EthStorage developers needed to create and maintain. For example, EthStorage did not need to build a custom “challenge validator” or ACL microservice; the security and identity management are handled by standard Ethereum accounts and smart contract logic. This freed the team to focus on storage-specific challenges like implementing the proof-of-storage scheme, optimizing how data is distributed and replicated among nodes, and ensuring the client software integrates smoothly with Ethereum nodes.

With fewer bespoke components, EthStorage’s overall architecture is leaner than Grove’s. Much of the complexity is pushed into the protocol and cryptography rather than into application infrastructure. Developing succinct proofs for storage and handling large volumes of data in a decentralized network is certainly complex, but that complexity is abstracted away in algorithms and low-level code, not in multi-layer system operations. From a developer or integrator perspective, interacting with EthStorage is relatively straightforward: it feels similar to using any other Ethereum smart contract (for writes and reads). In summary, EthStorage relies on well-established blockchain mechanisms and minimal new trust assumptions, which simplifies its design and maintenance compared to a multi-service solution like Grove.

7. Storage Cost

Grove: Because Grove offloads data storage to off-chain infrastructure, the cost to users is kept very low. Users do not need to pay gas fees for storing or updating content. Using Grove is more analogous to using a traditional cloud storage service in terms of cost. Lens has advertised that Grove offers the cost-efficiency of Web2 storage solutions like AWS S3 or Cloudflare R2. In practical terms, developers can store large amounts of content on Grove at a tiny fraction of the cost of on-chain alternatives. By keeping most operations off-chain, Grove avoids the per-transaction costs that blockchains typically impose, so adding or modifying content is essentially free from a gas perspective. Any fees that might eventually be introduced (such as subscriptions or usage-based fees) are expected to be low and predictable, similar to standard cloud pricing. It’s even possible that in the initial rollout period, these costs are subsidized or bundled into the Lens ecosystem’s platform costs to encourage adoption. The bottom line is that Grove minimizes the financial barriers for decentralized content storage by handling data off-chain. This makes it especially suitable for use cases like social networks or media-sharing dApps where content is abundant and frequently updated — users can interact without worrying about racking up blockchain fees for every post or edit.

EthStorage: EthStorage, on the other hand, provides on-chain data indexing and guarantees, which means users must pay the associated on-chain transaction fees. On the Ethereum mainnet, these fees can be significant in absolute terms, especially during periods of network congestion. However, EthStorage employs several technical optimizations to dramatically reduce the cost per unit of data compared to naive on-chain storage. Notably, EthStorage leverages Ethereum’s EIP-4844 “blob” transactions to publish bulk data at much lower gas cost. These blobs allow large data (on the order of ~128 KB per blob) to be included in blocks extremely cheaply by using Ethereum’s data availability layer. In addition, EthStorage is exploring Layer-2 deployments which could further cut costs. With these measures, EthStorage expects the effective storage cost to approach levels comparable to mainstream cloud storage solutions. In other words, while users do pay gas fees for each operation, the overall cost is brought down into a reasonable range. EthStorage thus offers a middle ground: it’s not as dirt-cheap as off-chain storage, but it provides strong on-chain guarantees and still keeps costs low enough to be practical for many applications.

Conclusion

Grove and EthStorage represent two distinct philosophies in the design of decentralized storage solutions. Lens Chain’s Grove prioritizes immediate usability, speed, and low cost by using off-chain components and centralized coordination, albeit at the expense of decentralization and permissionlessness in its early stage. EthStorage, in contrast, prioritizes trustlessness and on-chain verifiability, pushing as much logic to Ethereum as possible and incentivizing a community-run network of nodes, which results in greater decentralization but also higher user costs for now.

Each approach has its merits: Grove offers a smoother, more Web2-like experience which is crucial for social networking applications and scale, while EthStorage aims for a maximally decentralized architecture that could appeal to applications requiring strong guarantees and integration with Ethereum’s ecosystem. It’s encouraging to see both projects tackling the challenges of on-chain storage from different angles. As they mature, we may see Grove introduce more decentralization (and perhaps incentives) and EthStorage optimize for greater efficiency, potentially narrowing the gaps between them. Ultimately, these innovations benefit the Web3 community by expanding what’s possible for decentralized applications: from social content to fully on-chain dApps that require large-scale data storage. Developers and stakeholders can choose the solution (or even a combination) that best fits their needs on the spectrum between performance and decentralization, and the competition in this space will likely drive further improvements in the near future.

Reference:

• https://lens.xyz/docs/storage
• https://lens.xyz/news/introducing-grove-onchain-controlled-storage
• https://lens.xyz/news/lens-storage-nodes-a-deep-dive
• https://github.com/lens-protocol

To learn more about EthStorage and connect with our community, visit our community channels:

• EthStorage Website: https://ethstorage.io/
• Twitter: https://x.com/EthStorage
• Discord: https://discord.com/invite/xhCwaMp7ps
• Telegram: https://t.me/ethstorage