We all know this experience from our conventional lives where you love an article or a piece of media. You go back to it later and it is gone. It is frustrating, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Web3 promised higher availability and higher security, but so far we have mostly delivered that only for transactions, only for the accounting layer. But the world is not built on accounting layers. The world is built on computing infrastructures. And computing infrastructures must first store things and ensure they are still there tomorrow, the week ahead and going forward.

Even today, the Web3 ecosystem has not fully integrated this yet. We see NFT collections that represent valuable digital assets, but the actual media is stored on Web2 servers.

When someone forgets to pay a bill or a service shuts down, the assets would disappear. Sometimes you try to use a decentralized application and the front end is gone. Now, the infrastucture would still exist, but the interface does not.

So we cannot talk about an onchain future for the full stack without usable onchain data and storage.

This is the challenge the team set out to tackle by building Walrus.

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What is Walrus?

@Walrus 🦭/acc is a protocol running on Sui that offers secure decentralized storage.

At a basic level, Walrus lets you store images, videos and websites and read them again with high assurance that they will still be there and that they will be exactly what you uploaded. But the bigger idea is that Walrus lets you program the data experience.

I am a grown up, you are also grown up, so it is safe to say that Walrus is storage for grown ups. Just humour though. Lets get back. 😊

You can manage resources, manage costs and manage lifecycles as part of your decentralized application. Because Walrus is a protocol on Sui, it is tightly integrated with the Sui programming model.

You can build things like tickets where ownership and metadata live on Sui, while the associated media lives on Walrus.

You can transfer them together.

You can reveal some parts and keep others private.

You can program both together.


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The Building Phase

Traditional decentralized storage takes a file and stores it everywhere. That is expensive. To prevent data loss, you end up storing hundreds of copies. Walrus uses erasure coding that breaks a file into encoded chunks and distributes them across nodes. No matter how many nodes you use, the cost stays roughly five times the original file size.

Up to two thirds of the storage nodes can disappear and you can still read data. About one third can disappear and you can still write data. As nodes fail or leave, the network heals itself and new operators take over.

Walrus also scales with hardware. The more nodes you add, the more storage capacity the network has. It grows with more demand.

Because #Walrus runs on Sui, all its economics, governance, staking and rewards are handled by smart contracts. This means storage assets can be used inside Sui DeFi and other Sui applications. It also means developers can write smart contracts that customize how Walrus operates.

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Use Cases

Walrus is both a storage network and an application platform.

With it, one key application was also shipped called Walrus Sites. It lets you upload and serve a website from decentralized storage through a normal browser, with no friction for users.

Walrus is currently live and reached mainnet in about a year. It has already stored over 440 terabytes of encoded data and around five million blobs. About half a million WAL has been spent on storage operations, and about one billion WAL has been staked to secure the network. Peak upload speeds exceed 80 megabytes per second.

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Closing Thoughts

The real reason to use blockchains is not just to compute or store, but to do so with strong guarantees: availability, integrity, confidentiality, and neutrality.

Decentralization means no one can exclude you, rewrite the rules, or extract rent from your users.

The vision is to push from transaction processing into storage, and then into deeper security primitives. For Walrus, that means cheaper, faster, and more reliable storage.

Do try it out.
Their token ticker is $WAL