To expand on Walrus (WAL), the project has transitioned from an ambitious storage concept into a critical piece of the Sui blockchain infrastructure. As of January 2026, it is positioning itself as the "hard drive" for decentralized AI and high-end Web3 applications.
Here are the deeper details on why it’s gaining traction and how it works:
🛠️ The "RedStuff" Secret Sauce
Most decentralized storage (like Arweave) works by copying your entire file to dozens of different computers. This is expensive and slow.
• Erasure Coding: Walrus uses RedStuff. Instead of making 50 copies of a file, it chops a file into "slivers" and scatters them.
• Efficiency: You only need about 4x–5x the storage space to guarantee the file is safe, whereas competitors often use 100x+ for similar reliability.
• Speed: Because it uses simple math (XOR operations) rather than heavy encryption for every step, file retrieval is nearly as fast as centralized cloud services like AWS.
