The Silent Crisis Behind Web3 Growth in Walrus
Over the last decade, the digital asset space has grown at an incredible pace. Transactions became faster. Smart contracts became more expressive. Entire economies emerged on-chain. But while attention stayed fixed on execution and speed, one critical layer quietly fell behind storage.
This gap became obvious to me while looking at how NFTs, AI datasets, and unstructured data are actually handled today. Execution-focused blockchains like Sui are extremely powerful, but they were never designed to store large volumes of data efficiently. They excel at computation, not persistence. That’s where the storage trilemma starts to surface.
You can optimize for low cost, strong decentralization, or high performance, but achieving all three at once is rare. Storing large blobs directly on-chain quickly becomes impractical. It’s expensive, inefficient, and unsustainable as data scales. Yet at the same time, modern decentralized applications depend more than ever on media files, datasets, and long-lived state.
This imbalance created a quiet infrastructure problem. Execution kept improving, but data availability and storage lagged behind. Most people ignored it because it wasn’t immediately visible in transaction metrics or block times. But beneath the surface, the ecosystem was stretching against a limitation it couldn’t ignore forever.
That silent gap is now becoming impossible to overlook.
