#walrus $WAL **Walrus Protocol Team**
The Walrus Protocol didn't come from a random garage startup or an anonymous Telegram group.
It was born inside **Mysten Labs** — the same engineering powerhouse that built the Sui blockchain.
That already tells you most of what matters.
### Origin & DNA
Walrus started as an internal project at Mysten Labs to solve a very concrete problem: blockchains are great at small, structured data… but become hilariously inefficient when you try to store large unstructured blobs (videos, images, datasets, AI training corpora, game assets, archival blockchain history, etc.).
Instead of bolting yet another half-working IPFS/Filecoin wrapper onto Sui, the team decided to build a purpose-designed decentralized storage layer — one that keeps metadata, proofs, coordination and payments on Sui while distributing the actual heavy data with dramatically better replication economics (~4–5× instead of 100×+).
So Walrus is not “another storage protocol.”
It is **Sui-native decentralized blob storage**, engineered by people who already shipped one of the fastest production blockchains.
### Core Team Roots
The founding minds behind Walrus are the same people who created Sui:
- **Evan Cheng** — Co-founder & CEO of Mysten Labs → effectively the public face and strategic leader of Walrus in its early days
(ex-Meta/Novi R&D head, 10+ years Apple infrastructure, deep background in compilers & performance)
- **Sam Blackshear** — Co-founder & CTO of Mysten Labs → creator of the Move programming language
(the language that powers both Sui and Walrus programmability)
- **Adeniyi Abiodun** — Co-founder & CPO of Mysten Labs
(ex-Meta/Novi product lead, long track record in distributed systems)
The broader Mysten engineering group that contributed to Walrus includes alumni from Meta (Diem), Apple, Google, Oracle — people who spent years working on large-scale infrastructure, programming languages, cryptography and consensus systems.
In short: this is not a fresh team gambling on storage.