#Walrus
@Walrus 🦭/acc
The price proposals process in the Walrus Protocol serves as a decentralized, market-driven mechanism to determine the cost of storage. Unlike centralized providers that set fixed prices, Walrus uses a competitive bidding system during the transition of each epoch to ensure that storage remains affordable while remaining profitable for node operators.
1. The Bidding Phase
At the start of every epoch transition, each storage node operator within the candidate pool must submit a price proposal. This proposal represents the minimum amount of WAL tokens the operator is willing to accept to store one unit of data for a specific period. These bids are submitted directly to the Walrus system contracts on the Sui blockchain. This transparency prevents hidden fees and allows the market to see the real-time cost of decentralized infrastructure.
2. Stake-Weighted Aggregation
To prevent "race-to-the-bottom" pricing that could compromise network security or "price gouging" by smaller actors, Walrus employs a stake-weighted calculation. The protocol aggregates all submitted price proposals and sorts them from lowest to highest. It then maps these prices against the total amount of WAL tokens staked to each respective node.
3. Selection of the Target Price
The final network price for the new epoch is typically determined by the 66.67th percentile (two-thirds) of the total stake. By selecting the price at this threshold, the protocol ensures that the cost is high enough to attract high-quality, heavily-staked nodes that provide reliable hardware, yet low enough to remain competitive with other storage solutions. This "consensus price" becomes the standard rate for all new Binary Large Objects (blobs) uploaded during that epoch.
4. Economic Incentives and Revenue
Once the price is set, the Storage Fund uses it to calculate the upfront cost for users. This mechanism ensures "Marketplace Fluidity":
Node Revenue: Operators who proposed a price lower than or equal to the selected target price are selected for the active committee and receive their share of the reward distribution cycle.
Predictability: By 2026, this system has created a stable "storage yield" for WAL stakers, as the price proposals reflect the actual operational costs of energy and hardware, providing a sustainable economic foundation for the entire ecosystem.