Walrus makes storage priceable, stakeable, and tradable.
Walrus runs on Sui and treats big files as blobs you can program around. Red Stuff erasure coding targets ~4.5x overhead, and the encoded blob size is ~5x the original. Walrus can also sit under encrypted blobs, so privacy is owned by your keys, not by a cloud admin. Mainnet went live Mar 27 2025 with 100+ independent node operators, and availability is designed to hold even if roughly two thirds of nodes drop. WAL buys storage for fixed time, with pricing engineered to stay stable in fiat terms. Supply is capped at 5B. 43% community reserve, 30% core contributors, 10% user drop, 10% subsidies, 7% investors. Stakers secure nodes, and short term stake shifts pay a fee that is partly burned, with slashing for low performance. As of Jan 14 2026, WAL is about $0.16 with ~$17M 24h volume and ~$253M market cap. My takeaway. Treat WAL like an infra yield curve. Watch stored bytes, uptime, and how fast subsidies taper.
