The Walrus protocol has completed $140 million in financing, valuing it at $2 billion.
On March 20, the decentralized storage protocol Walrus launched by Sui developer Mysten Labs announced the completion of $140 million in financing, led by Standard Crypto, with participation from ten institutions including a16z crypto, Electric Capital, and Franklin Templeton Digital Assets. The funds were raised through the sale of the protocol's token $WAL, with a total token supply valuation reaching $2 billion.
Sui developer Mysten Labs provides technical endorsement; mainnet launches on 3/27.
The Walrus protocol is built by the high-speed blockchain development team Mysten Labs, which includes several former technical backbones from Meta. The Walrus protocol aims to address the scalability and security bottlenecks of existing decentralized storage solutions, providing more efficient storage services. Although still in the testing phase, Mysten Labs has implemented website hosting features based on the Walrus protocol and announced that the mainnet will officially launch on March 27.
Token economic model: Half of the supply reserved for the community; investors locked for one year.
Walrus synchronously announces the token WAL economic model:
Total supply: 5 billion tokens.
Initial circulation: 1.25 billion tokens (25%).
Distribution ratio:
10% allocated for user airdrops.
43% reserved for community reserves (developer incentives, funding programs).
30% allocated to core contributors.
10% subsidizes storage node operations.
7% allocated to investors (locked for 12 months after mainnet launch).
Deflationary mechanism: Staking penalties and node efficiency monitoring.
The protocol design includes two major deflationary mechanisms to maintain long-term stability:
Short-term staking penalties: Those who unstake before 180 days must pay a fine.
Node efficiency elimination: Nodes with storage efficiency below 50% will have their resource quotas automatically reduced.
This design aims to curb speculative staking and ensure efficient utilization of network resources.
Market positioning: Challenging the decentralized storage competitive landscape.
After the launch of the Walrus protocol, it will directly compete with existing projects like Filecoin and Arweave. Mysten Labs emphasizes that its technology can reduce storage costs by up to 60% and achieve instant data access through the high throughput of the Sui blockchain. Investor Standard Crypto states that Walrus's economic model and penalty mechanism are key differentiated advantages for attracting institutional bets.
