Walrus is an innovative decentralized storage network for blockchain apps and autonomous agents.
The Walrus storage system is being released today as a developer preview for Sui builders in order to gather feedback. We expect a broad rollout to other web3 communities very soon!
A subset of slivers can be used to rapidly reconstruct the original blob, even when up to two-thirds of the slivers are missing. This is possible while keeping the replication factor down to a minimal 4x-5x, similar to existing cloud-based services, but with the additional benefits of decentralization and resilience to more
Sui is the most advanced blockchain system in relation to storage on validators, with innovations such as a storage fund that future-proofs the cost of storing data on-chain.While this is necessary for replicated computing and smart contracts acting on the state of the blockchain, it is inefficient for simply storing unstructured data blobs, such as music, video, blockchain history, etc.
Walrus allows for the uploading of gigabytes of data at a time with minimal cost, making it an ideal solution for storing large volumes of data.
Walrus can do this because the data blob is transmitted only once over the network, and storage nodes only spend a fraction of resources compared to the blob size. As a result, the more storage nodes the system has, the fewer resources each storage node uses per blob.
Decentralized storage can take multiple forms in modern ecosystems. For instance, it offers better guarantees for digital assets traded as NFTs. Unlike current designs that store data off-chain, decentralized storage ensures users own the actual resource, not just metadata, mitigating risks of data being taken down or misrepresented.
Additionally, decentralized storage is not only useful for storing data such as pictures or files with high availability; it can also double as a low-cost data availability layer for rollups. Here, sequencers can upload transactions on Walrus, and the rollup executor only needs to temporarily reconstruct them for execution.
Walrus is powered by the Sui Network and scales horizontally to hundreds or thousands of networked decentralized storage nodes. This should enable Walrus to offer Exabytes of storage at costs competitive with current centralized offerings, given the higher assurance and decentralization.
