Decentralized storage indeed faces multiple challenges regarding cost, efficiency, and censorship resistance, and the Walrus protocol you mentioned offers some targeted solutions. Below, I will summarize the common pain points and Walrus's strategies based on publicly available information.
The common pain points of decentralized storage are currently cost, efficiency, and censorship resistance! To understand a project's breakthroughs, it's essential to first understand the problems the industry generally faces:
High costs: Persistent storage based on blockchain requires each node to replicate all data. This not only leads to expensive on-chain storage costs (gas fees) but also causes the scale of the chain to grow indefinitely, ultimately making it difficult for a single node to operate.
Efficiency bottlenecks: Processing large amounts of data (such as TB-level) on traditional blockchains will be limited by the chain's throughput and storage capacity, becoming a performance bottleneck.
Persistence and anti-censorship challenges: Ensuring that data is retained long-term and reliably, and not controlled or deleted by a single entity, is a core technical challenge. The system needs a persistence mechanism (how data is permanently saved) and a data retention mechanism (how to ensure that nodes actually store the data, usually achieved through cryptographic challenges).
🦭 Walrus Protocol how to respond?
Walrus is built on the Sui blockchain and aims to solve the above issues through unique design.
1. Core architecture: Modular design
Walrus is not an independent blockchain, but a modular storage layer on Sui. It places storage nodes off-chain while using the Sui chain to handle payments, metadata, and coordination. This enables it to inherit Sui's high throughput performance and makes it easier for developers in the Sui ecosystem to integrate.
2. Key technology: Erasure Coding
This is the core technology that Walrus uses to reduce costs. It does not create complete copies of the files but instead splits the files into multiple data shards and adds some redundant parity shards.
Cost advantage: Only a portion of the shards (rather than all shards) is needed to restore the complete file, thus only about 4-5 times of $WAL redundancy is required, much lower than traditional replication mechanisms (like 10 times). Official claims indicate that this makes its storage costs about 80% lower than Filecoin and over 100 times lower than Arweave.
Reliability: Even if some nodes fail, data can still be recovered from the remaining shards, ensuring availability and anti-censorship.
3. Economic model: dual-token system
$WAL : Used to pay for storage costs, node staking, and rewards, is the core of the storage economy.
SUI: Used to pay for the Gas fees required for coordinating transactions on the Sui chain (such as uploads, renewals).
This design isolates storage costs from the transaction fluctuations of the underlying chain, but also introduces the complexity of dual-system coordination.
The advantages and potential challenges of Walrus
Based on existing information, a comparison of Walrus's main advantages and aspects to note:
Main advantages of Walrus
Significant cost advantage
Basis: By using erasure coding technology, redundancy is reduced to 4-5 times.
Specific performance: Claims costs are far lower than Filecoin, Arweave, etc.
High throughput and programmability
Basis: Leveraging Sui's high-performance foundation, suitable for handling AI datasets, videos, and other large files. Storage objects can be treated as assets on the Sui chain and called by smart contracts.
Specific performance: Facilitates development integration and supports complex application scenarios.
Anti-censorship and persistence
Basis: Data is sharded and stored globally in a distributed manner. Ensures that nodes actually store data through cryptographic challenges and staking penalty mechanisms.
Specific performance: No single point of failure, theoretically difficult to delete or tamper with.
Aspects to note
Architectural complexity
Content: On-chain (Sui) coordination and off-chain storage require cross-layer collaboration.
Potential impact: may have higher latency than a monolithic architecture, making implementation more complex.
Ecosystem and adoption are in early stages
Content: The project is developing rapidly, with PB-level storage and ecological applications already, but overall is still in its early stages.
Potential impact: Network effects, long-term stability, and market acceptance remain to be validated over time.
Relies on the Sui ecosystem
Content: Its development is closely tied to the success of the Sui blockchain.
Potential impact: The performance, security, and ecological prosperity of Sui itself are important external variables. @Walrus 🦭/acc #Wairus $WAL #walrus
