While everyone watched Bitcoin's price drop over the weekend, some important news about Walrus (WAL) flew under the radar. Walrus is a key piece of the Verifiable AI Stack, which the Sui Foundation officially announced on January 13.
If you still think of WAL as just another Filecoin competitor, you're looking at it wrong. Walrus has moved away from being just cloud storage for JPEGs and is acting as a data lake for Autonomous Agents.
Why is Verifiable AI a big deal? AI agents need data like past actions, decision-making information, and training records. But storing all this on a fast blockchain like Sui is too expensive. Plus, keeping it all in one place on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not secure or verifiable. Walrus solves this issue.
The new setup allows AI models to keep large amounts of data on Walrus while proving the data's authenticity on the blockchain. This means an AI agent can prove it learned from a specific dataset without showing the data to everyone. Walrus does this with something called Red Stuff encoding, which allows for fast data retrieval for real-time AI tasks. This is something that Arweave's permanent storage solution can't easily do.
Walrus Websites: Server Costs Are Over. Developers who are tired of paying for Vercel or AWS are starting to use Walrus Sites. Since mid-January, there's been a rise in Serverless websites fully hosted on Walrus. These aren't just simple HTML pages; they're complete decentralized applications (dApps) controlled by a Sui Address.
These sites have built-in support for Sui Name Service (SuiNS), so you can host a website like yourname.sui without monthly fees. You just pay once in WAL tokens.
The recent shutdown of the Tusky interface on January 19 showed how tough this model is. Even when the interface was down, the data on Walrus was still accessible through other routes, showing that Walrus Sites is truly decentralized.
The Kimchi Premium is back. Upbit, which handles about 80% of South Korea's cryptocurrency trading, began allowing deposits and withdrawals for the Sui Network (including WAL tokens) on January 15, after a maintenance break. This has reopened a key path for money to flow in.
While the price is holding steady around $0.14–$0.15, the resistance at $0.163 seems to be weakening as more money comes in and the AI story gets stronger.
Keep an eye out for the first Agentic dApps launching on Sui in late Q1. If these dApps use Walrus for data logging as planned, WAL's burn rate could rise quickly, separating it from the rest of the storage market.
