I was looking at the @Walrus 🦭/acc the day and it seems like one of those projects that is simple to overlook at first.. When you really think about what the Walrus Protocol is trying to do it is pretty tough to ignore. The Walrus Protocol is trying to be a player, in the field of data infrastructure. The Walrus Protocol is focused on what people need when it comes to the era of artificial intelligence, which is the Walrus Protocols main goal.
AI systems are completely dependent, on data. We are talking about amounts of information here not just tiny bits. This data needs to be kept safe it needs to be easy to get to. It needs to be checked regularly. The usual way of storing things in one place works, but it has some big downsides. When you do it this way one person or company has all the power they can censor things and users have to put a lot of trust in this one provider to keep their data safe. Walrus is doing things differently by creating a way to store data, which is specifically made for handling large amounts of data.
What I notice away is that Walrus is not just a place to store files and then forget about them. Walrus thinks of data as something that's important for a long time. Walrus breaks down data into pieces and sends these pieces to many different computers, which makes the data very safe and hard to get rid of or hide. Even if some of the computers in the network are not working the data can still be found. This is really important for things that use intelligence and need to be able to get to the data all the time and know it will be the same. Walrus is about keeping data safe and making sure it is always available which is really important, for artificial intelligence work that needs to be able to use the data all the time.
Verification is really important when it comes to the design. The people who store data have to show that they actually have the data they say they are storing. This way we do not have to trust them without knowing for sure. Instead we get guarantees that we can measure. For people who work with data like the data used for training artificial intelligence or for research or for looking at numbers this kind of assurance is very important. The data verification is what gives us this assurance and the storage providers must do the verification to prove they have the data, like the datasets.
Privacy is handled in a simple way. In the time of Artificial Intelligence, where a lot of data's private or belongs to a company it is very important to have this balance between being open and being in control of the data. The data and the way it is handled is very important, to the owner of the data.
The Walrus also thinks beyond storage. It lets applications work with the stored data without making a copy of it or showing the contents. This makes it possible for Walrus to have artificial intelligence datasets, shared data markets where people can work together and collaborative research on Walrus where people do not have to trust just one person to be, in charge of everything related to Walrus.
The WAL token is what holds the system together. It makes sure that everyone is working towards the goal. When users need storage or services they have to pay for them. The people who provide these things get paid when they do their job right. If someone is involved with the system for a time they can put some of their WAL tokens aside and help make decisions about the system. The WAL token is connected to how people actually use the system not just what people say they will do. The growth of the WAL token depends on people using the system not just empty promises, about what might happen.
Overall, Walrus feels like infrastructure built for the next phase of Web3 and AI, not the last one. It is focused, patient, and grounded in real needs. For anyone watching how data, decentralization, and AI intersect, Walrus is a project worth paying attention to.