The Walrus decentralized storage platform â a native data layer built on the Sui blockchain by Mysten Labs â has released a major upgrade to its official TypeScript SDK, expanding its capabilities with the Upload Relay and native support for Quilt. This improvement empowers developers to build faster, more reliable, and more userâfriendly applications that store data on Walrus directly from client devices and web browsers. 
Walrus has seen rapid adoption since its Mainnet launch in March 2025, with over 758 TB of data stored and adoption by hundreds of projects, including winners from prominent hackathons and practical deployments on multichain applications.
What Is Walrus and Its Ecosystem?
Walrus is a decentralized data storage protocol that provides secure, decentralized, and scalable storage for large blobs (files) without relying on centralized servers. Storage on Walrus is anchored to the Sui blockchain but distributed among storage nodes, making it resilient and censorshipâresistant. The protocol supports blobs and, with the latest upgrades, Quilts â bundled small files â to improve efficiency and storage economics for small file workloads.
Developers can interact with Walrus through multiple tools: the CLI, Rust and TypeScript SDKs, as well as thirdâparty services for specialized use cases.
The TypeScript SDK Upgrade
The official Walrus TypeScript SDK is the primary toolkit for building web applications and backend services in JavaScript/TypeScript that interact with Walrus. With the latest upgrade released in midâ2025, the SDK now includes two major enhancements:
Upload Relay Integration
Native Quilt Support
Upload Relay: A Faster, More Reliable Upload Path
Uploading data to Walrus traditionally involves distributing encoded shards â slivers â across many storage nodes. This process can require hundreds or thousands of network connections, which can be slow and unreliable for client apps on browsers or mobile networks.
The Upload Relay is a companion service â a lightweight, highâperformance HTTP relay â that offloads this âlastâmileâ shard distribution from the client, simplifying uploads and improving speed and reliability. The client sends the unencoded blob (file) to the relay via a single HTTP POST request. The relay handles encoding and distributing data to storage nodes, then returns a storage confirmation certificate for onâchain certification.
Key benefits include:
Improved performance for uploads in lowâconnectivity environments like mobile networks.
Lower infrastructure requirements â developers can run simple relay instances without complex cloud setups.
Optional monetization â relay operators can accept tips in SUI tokens for paid services.
Minimal trust assumptions â clients can detect if a relay behaves maliciously, since onâchain certification is controlled locally.
Developers can run their own Relay or use community or Mysten Labsâoperated relays for improved upload performance.
Quilt Support for Small Files
Alongside Upload Relay, the SDK now supports Quilt, a Walrus feature that groups many small files into a single logical unit to reduce storage overhead and costs while enabling efficient individual access. This makes Walrus much more practical for apps handling numerous small assets like thumbnails, JSON metadata, or small documents.
Impact for Developers
The upgraded TypeScript SDK means developers can now:
Build apps where end usersâ wallets directly pay for storage transactions.
Leverage Upload Relay to make uploads faster and more resilient even on consumer devices.
Use a unified API (WalrusFile) for both blobs and quilts.
This upgrade positions Walrus as a more robust and developerâfriendly decentralized storage solution that bridges modern application needs with decentralized storage principles.
