The most significant market is the least obvious, the Storage Market.
Cryptocurrency circles are preoccupied with TPS, commissions and rollups. However, the actual long-run bottleneck is data. The size of AI models, social graphs, game states and media libraries are exploding. The majority of this information is not necessary to be performed, however, it should be at hand.
Walrus occupies a highly narrow space: it is neither as costly as fully onchain data (nor as costly as fully centralized data). It is not a very crowded niche--it is an underbuilt one.
The difference between Walrus and Filecoin and Arweave.
Filecoin is aimed at long-term archival storage, and it has a high hardware demand. Arweave is interested in permanent data, paid one upfront. Walrus is different. It is created to serve active data-data which is read on a regular basis by the apps, updated and relied upon.
Walrus optimizes for:
Economicalness as compared to replication.
Cold storage to app integration.
This also renders it far more appropriate in the current app workloads, particularly on high-performance chains such as Sui.
Why Sui Matters Here
The object model presented by Sui enables the references to data to be clean, composable, and parallel. Walrus does this to make blobs look like natives and not foreigners. That is significant since developers do not desire another system they need to glue. They desire storage to be a part of the chain mental model.
Sui was designed to be fast, and Walrus ensures Sui does not experience data bloat. It is not a symbiotic relationship with an add-on of the ecosystem.
Market Reality Check
Competition is not the biggest challenge that Walrus can encounter, its adoption is. The developers are stingy in regards to infrastructure. It is risky to change storage models. Walrus has to demonstrate that it does not only work, but it works in an uninterested manner when under stress.
When it is successful, it is invisible infrastructure. In case of failure, it will not be dramatic, it will be simply neglected. That is the most difficult type of a market.
