Walrus: In-Depth Analysis of Next-Generation Decentralized Storage Protocol and Commercial Application Cases
1️⃣ Introduction:
With the popularization of blockchain technology, on-chain data is growing explosively. Taking Bitcoin and Ethereum as examples, the former has reached 650GB of on-chain data, while Ethereum's archive nodes are as high as 21.2TB. Currently, most incentive mechanisms still only focus on computational resources, neglecting storage incentives.
The Sui network addresses this pain point by designing a 'Storage Fund', which collects user storage fees in advance and returns them to validators in installments, incentivizing long-term data availability and encouraging users to delete unnecessary data to reduce the burden on the entire network.
2️⃣ Walrus - A Decentralized Storage Protocol Designed for Large-Scale Data @Walrus_CN
In on-chain storage, transaction data is usually small in size and crucial for state computation, and must be fully preserved by each node. However, large Blob data such as images, videos, and documents do not need to be redundantly stored by every node in the network. To this end, Mysten Labs has introduced the Walrus protocol, designed for the decentralized and efficient storage of large files, which is their biggest bet this year.
In March 2025, the Walrus Foundation completed $140 million in financing, with investors including top crypto funds like a16z crypto, Standard Crypto, and Electric Capital, reflecting the capital market's high recognition of its technology and commercial prospects. Walrus is deeply integrated with the Sui ecosystem and will further incentivize ecosystem development through the $WAL token in the future.
3️⃣ Core Technologies and Innovations of Walrus
🔸 Non-Blockchain Architecture: Walrus itself is not a blockchain but utilizes the Sui network to manage storage nodes, incentive distribution, and metadata on-chain.
🔸 Efficient Encoding Mechanism: It uses the 'Red Stuff' two-dimensional erasure code to split large files into 'slivers' and 'symbols', distributed across nodes, achieving a redundancy replication rate of 4-5 times, significantly reducing storage and recovery costs.
🔸 Compatibility with Traditional Systems: It supports CLI, SDK, and HTTP interfaces, allowing seamless integration with traditional content distribution networks such as caching and CDN, achieving low latency and high availability.
🔸 Incentives and Lifecycle Management: Based on Sui smart contracts, it implements node lifecycle management and incentive distribution, ensuring long-term data availability.
Comparison with Current Mainstream Storage Protocols
4️⃣ Commercial Application Cases
1. NFT and Digital Art Certification
Solving the problem of NFT 'losing images' due to traditional IPFS nodes going offline.
2. Decentralized AI Training Data Storage
AI model training requires massive high-quality datasets, and Walrus can provide AI companies with secure, low-cost, and verifiable data storage infrastructure, ensuring data integrity and traceability, supporting transparent training and compliance auditing of AI models.
3. Web3 Content Distribution and Decentralized Frontend
Decentralized applications (dApps) can host frontend code, static resources, and more on Walrus, combined with CDN acceleration to achieve censorship resistance and globally high availability for Web3 content distribution networks.
4. Rollup Chains and Layer 2 Scalability Data Archiving
Layer 2 rollup chains need to regularly archive transaction batch data (blobs), and Walrus can provide efficient and low-cost storage solutions, enhancing data availability guarantees for main chains like Ethereum.
5️⃣ WAL's Economic Model: Sustainable Incentives and Community First
Walrus builds a self-driven ecosystem through token economics and staking mechanisms:
• WAL Token Functions:
🔹 Payment: Users pay storage fees with WAL, distributed to nodes on an epoch basis.
🔹 Staking and Security: Nodes stake WAL to participate in storage, and malicious behavior will lead to penalties.
🔹 Governance: Token holders vote to determine protocol parameters, such as penalty ratios and recovery rules.
• Token Distribution:
- Total supply 5 billion, with community reserves accounting for 43%, airdrop for 10% (priority for mainnet users), and only 7% for investors, highlighting the community-driven concept. The initial airdrop of $WAL is 4%, with another 6% reserved for future community incentives.
• Economic Incentives:
• Nodes distribute storage tasks based on staking ratios, with rewards linked to contributions; users can receive refunds for deleting redundant data, reducing network load.
6️⃣ Ecological Synergy: The Multiplier Effect of the Sui Network
Walrus is deeply integrated with Sui, forming a complementary technology
• On-Chain and Off-Chain Collaboration: Metadata on-chain ensures verifiability, while Blob data off-chain storage improves efficiency.
• Cross-Chain Value Capture: The use of Walrus creates external demand for SUI tokens, enhancing the ecological value network.
7️⃣ Competitive Advantages of Walrus
• Technical Barriers: The efficient recovery capability of Red Stuff has no competitive products to rival.
• First-Mover Advantage in Ecosystem: Leveraging Sui's mature developer community and Mysten Labs' technological reserves, a diverse application ecosystem has been built.
• Market Positioning: Aiming at the blue ocean of unstructured data, filling the demand gap between Filecoin and Arweave.
8️⃣ Conclusion: Reshaping Internet Storage
Walrus is not only the infrastructure of the Sui ecosystem but also a paradigm shift in the decentralized storage field. With extreme cost advantages, smart contract friendliness, and strong ecological incentives, it provides a future-oriented decentralized storage solution for Web3 and the broader digital economy.
Providing an efficient, economical, and verifiable large-scale data storage infrastructure for the Web3 world. It demonstrates strong commercial potential in scenarios such as NFTs, AI, decentralized content distribution, and Layer 2 data archiving.
#WAL
