The story around Walrus Protocol really picked up steam in the past year and it’s moving from idea to real infrastructure. One of the big milestones came when the Walrus team launched their public testnet on the Sui blockchain, giving developers and node operators a first hands-on look at the system’s decentralized storage capabilities. This testnet allowed people to upload, retrieve, and interact with decentralized data — which is the core promise of what Walrus wants to become: a reliable data layer for Web3 apps, not just smart contract logic.
Parallel to that, Walrus has been steadily gaining traction through partnerships and ecosystem integrations. You’ll see it tied into AI platforms, NFT marketplaces, decentralized social projects, and apps that actually need scalable storage — beyond just storing a simple JSON file pointer. These aren’t background experiments; they are real integrations showing practical utility.
One of the major foundational developments for Walrus was the $140M fundraising round led by big investors, which funded a lot of the development momentum. That funding backed everything from mainnet planning to ecosystem grants and ecosystem growth activities around the protocol.
Most recently, upgrades to the protocol itself have been focused on improving scalability and decentralization as the network grows. Developers are working on dynamic sharding, better incentive structures, and caching layers so data retrieval can be fast even at larger scale — a critical step toward competing with centralized storage networks.
In short, Walrus is transitioning from concept to working infrastructure — public testnet, growing app integrations, ecosystem partnerships, and core protocol improvements. For anyone watching decentralized storage in Web3, the last few months have been some of the most concrete and meaningful so far.