Walrus vs. Replication-First Storage
Traditional replication-first storage systems favor simplicity: they maintain full copies of data across multiple nodes, achieving fault tolerance at the expense of significant storage overhead. Walrus takes a different approach.
By using erasure coding, Walrus delivers the same level of fault tolerance with far lower storage requirements. Instead of duplicating entire datasets, data is fragmented and distributed mathematically, reducing waste while preserving reliability.
This design shifts the core challenge from raw capacity to strong availability guarantees. In Walrus, redundancy is treated as a mathematical property rather than an operational burden. As a result, $WAL incentives are aligned with fragment availability, rewarding what actually matters for network resilience—not inefficient duplication.
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