@Walrus 🦭/acc | #walrus | $WAL | #Walrus
Hearing “data isn’t really deleted on Walrus” can land with a jolt. Cloud apps trained us to believe there’s a clean off-switch: delete the file, empty the trash, move on. Walrus is built for something else. It aims to keep large files available and verifiable on a decentralized network, without requiring trust in one company’s servers.
On Walrus, “delete” is closer to “stop guaranteeing” than “erase every trace.” A stored file becomes a blob: a small onchain record plus data kept off-chain. That data is split into pieces and spread across storage nodes. To read it back, the network gathers enough pieces to reconstruct the file and verifies it against a content-based identifier. Once a blob is certified, nodes are expected to keep enough pieces available for the period you paid for, and the chain records events proving that promise. During that window, deletion is fighting the design: the system is optimized to prevent complete disappearance.
#Walrus makes the tradeoff explicit with two kinds of blobs: deletable and non-deletable. If a blob is deletable, the owner can remove it before expiry, mainly to reclaim the storage resource and reuse it. If it’s non-deletable, it can’t be removed early and is meant to stay available for the full prepaid period. That option exists for cases where persistence is the point, like public assets, onchain-linked media, or shared datasets that others depend on.
Even with deletable blobs, Walrus cautions you not to treat deletion as privacy. Deleting doesn’t rewind time or reach into other people’s devices. It can’t reliably erase every cache across a distributed network. It also can’t claw back copies someone already downloaded, forwarded, or re-uploaded. If this is sensitive data, here’s the hard truth: deleting it might reduce your responsibility, but it doesn’t make it secret again. Most of the time, “I deleted it” really means “I stopped taking care of it,” not “every copy is gone.”
Content-based IDs add another twist. Identical files map to the same blob ID. So you might delete “your” instance and stop paying for it, while the underlying data remains retrievable because another user stored the same content, or because it was mirrored elsewhere. That’s why “never deleted” is less a slogan than a reminder: once information is published into systems built to replicate and survive failures, one person can’t make it evaporate.
Walrus is trending for a few different reasons. It hit public mainnet in 2025, which naturally pulled in more builders—and more people poking at it closely. At the same time, folks are getting tired of platforms that can pull the plug or delete things overnight. And with AI exploding, proving what’s real (and where it came from) suddenly matters a lot. Storage doesn’t feel like boring infrastructure anymore—it feels like the foundation. That’s why ideas like programmable storage and onchain-linked media suddenly sound practical, not theoretical.
Walrus fits the moment because it treats availability as something you can rely on and verify, not just hope for. But it also asks for a mindset shift. Uploading to Walrus is closer to publishing than dropping a file in a private folder. I’ve seen teams treat “we’ll delete it later” as a safety valve, even when the system can’t promise it. If it’s truly sensitive, the safer move isn’t “I’ll delete it later.” It’s “I’m not putting it there to begin with.” That can feel a bit strict, but it’s the honest approach. In systems built to remember, the real choice isn’t whether deletion exists—it’s what you’re choosing to make permanent.
