Decentralized storage is one of the most natural applications built on blockchains and a central component of the Web3 ecosystem. Yet despite a decade of active development -- from IPFS and Filecoin to more recent entrants -- most of these storage protocols have received limited formal analysis of their incentive properties. Claims of incentive compatibility are sometimes made, but rarely proven. This gap matters: without well-designed incentives, a system may distribute storage but fail to truly decentralize it. We analyze Shelby -- a storage network protocol recently proposed by Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto -- and provide the first formal proof of its incentive properties. Our game-theoretic model shows that while off-chain audits alone collapse to universal shirking, Shelby's combination of peer audits with occasional on-chain verification yields incentive compatibility under natural parameter settings. We also examine coalition behavior and outline a simple modification that strengthens the protocol's collusion-resilience.

翻译：去中心化存储是基于区块链最自然的应用之一，也是Web3生态系统的核心组成部分。然而，尽管经过十年积极发展——从IPFS和Filecoin到近期新进入者——大多数存储协议对其激励特性的形式化分析仍然有限。激励兼容性的主张时有提出，但鲜有严格证明。这一差距至关重要：若缺乏精心设计的激励机制，系统可能实现存储分发，却无法真正实现去中心化。本文分析由Aptos Labs与Jump Crypto近期提出的存储网络协议Shelby，并首次对其激励特性提供形式化证明。我们的博弈论模型表明：虽然纯链下审计会退化为普遍怠工，但Shelby将节点间审计与偶发链上验证相结合，在自然参数设置下可实现激励兼容性。我们还考察了联盟行为，并概述了一种能增强协议抗合谋能力的简单改进方案。