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I've been watching Walrus holders behave strangely as WAL sits at $0.1352 for the past few hours after yesterday's drop. Down another 3.91% today. Volume dropped to just 5.73 million tokens in 24 hours. RSI hovering at 30.68, still technically oversold. But here's what's strange—nobody's actually selling in meaningful size.
That sounds good until you think about what it means.
When Walrus dropped from $0.1423 to $0.1350, barely half a percent of circulating supply changed hands. 5.73 million WAL out of 1.58 billion. That's not holders showing conviction. That's liquidity drying up. And dried liquidity creates problems that most Walrus supporters haven't thought through yet.
Right now the 24-hour volume in USDT terms is $798,849. Less than $800k moving an entire protocol's token price around. I've seen individual whale trades bigger than Walrus's entire daily volume. That's not depth. That's fragility pretending to be stability.

The usual explanation is that WAL tokens are locked in stakes. Node operators committed to infrastructure can't just dump. Delegators earning rewards aren't liquid. Fine. That removes sell pressure. But it also removes the other side of the equation—there's no buying pressure either because there's nowhere to buy size without moving the market violently.
Think about what happens when someone actually needs to acquire meaningful WAL position. Maybe a new storage node operator wants to stake. Maybe an application needs tokens to prepay for capacity. They can't buy $100k worth without spiking the price significantly. The order books are too thin. Slippage would eat them alive.
Walrus pricing mechanisms assume some baseline liquidity exists. Storage costs get voted on every epoch based on fiat targets, but those votes mean nothing if the token itself has no reliable price discovery. When volume sits at $798k daily and 95%+ of supply is locked or inactive, what's the "real" price of WAL?
The answer is whatever the last marginal seller accepted. And right now that's $0.1352. But it's not like thousands of people independently decided that's fair value. It's just where the few available tokens happened to trade when someone hit market sell.
I keep thinking about what happens during the next unlock event. Walrus has 3.42 billion WAL still locked out of 5 billion max supply. Eventually portions of that unlock. When they do, even small amounts hitting the market could move price significantly if current liquidity conditions persist.

Most projects would kill for low sell pressure. Walrus has it. But paired with equally low buy pressure and thin books, it's not the flex people assume. It's just illiquid.
Here's where it gets uncomfortable. Storage nodes need to acquire WAL to expand operations. They earn revenue in WAL but might need to buy more for additional stake. When liquidity is this thin, even routine operational purchases become price events. That's backwards from how infrastructure tokens should work.
The 105 Walrus operators running nodes across 17 countries aren't worried about daily price moves. They're building for years. But they still need functioning token markets to manage their operations. If buying $50k worth of WAL moves the market 5%, that's a problem for anyone trying to scale infrastructure.
Walrus burns WAL through slashing and certain fee mechanisms. Deflationary pressure is real. But deflation only matters if there's actual price discovery happening. Burning tokens in an illiquid market just makes the remaining supply even harder to trade without impact.
The RSI at 30.68 screams oversold. Technical analysts would say bounce incoming. But oversold with volume this thin doesn't mean the same thing. There's no flood of buyers waiting to step in because there weren't many buyers to begin with. It's not accumulation. It's absence.
I pulled up the order book earlier. Bid-ask spreads wider than they should be for a protocol with Walrus's backing. Not enough depth on either side. A few thousand dollars of market orders could gap the price in either direction. That's not how serious infrastructure projects trade.
Maybe this is temporary. Maybe as Walrus usage grows, more participants need to hold WAL for operational reasons and liquidity improves naturally. Or maybe the token design accidentally created a situation where most supply stays locked forever and the tiny tradeable float just bounces around based on whoever needs to buy or sell for non-speculative reasons.
What's clear is that low selling pressure isn't saving Walrus from anything. It's paired with equally low buying interest and the combination creates fragile price discovery. The token might be down only 3.91% today, but that number is almost meaningless when it's based on less than $800k of actual trading.
Walrus infrastructure keeps running. Storage keeps getting allocated. Nodes keep operating. All true. But the token trading dynamics are developing in ways that might become a problem if they persist. You can't build serious infrastructure on top of a token that trades like a micro-cap altcoin with no liquidity.
I don't know if this gets better or worse from here. What I do know is that everyone celebrating "holders not selling" is missing the part where nobody's buying either. And in markets, absence of selling without presence of buying isn't bullish. It's just empty.
Time will tell if Walrus figures out how to bootstrap real liquidity. For now, the price is whatever the last trade happened to be, based on almost no volume and even less depth. That's not price discovery. That's price accident.
@Walrus 🦭/acc #walrus $WAL

Il “diritto di essere dimenticati” ha infranto la blockchain, o almeno ha infranto la maggior parte delle architetture blockchain. Le normative europee sulla privacy richiedono che gli individui possano richiedere la cancellazione dei propri dati personali in circostanze specifiche. La caratteristica fondamentale della blockchain è l'immutabilità. I dati scritti nella catena rimangono lì permanentemente. Questi requisiti sembravano fondamentalmente incompatibili, e la maggior parte dei progetti blockchain ha semplicemente ignorato il problema, sperando che non importasse. Dusk non l'ha ignorato.
Era importante. Le aziende che operano in Europa hanno iniziato a ricevere pareri legali su se l'uso di blockchain pubbliche per qualsiasi applicazione che coinvolgesse dati personali violasse il GDPR. Le risposte erano per lo più “sì, probabilmente.” Mettere nomi, indirizzi, dettagli delle transazioni o qualsiasi informazione identificabile personalmente direttamente su registri pubblici immutabili crea problemi di conformità che non possono essere facilmente risolti in seguito. È qui che Dusk ha intrapreso un percorso architettonico diverso.

Quando il Gruppo di Azione Finanziaria ha aggiornato la regola di viaggio nel 2019, la maggior parte dell'industria cripto l'ha ignorata. Sembrava un altro requisito burocratico che i sistemi decentralizzati avrebbero in qualche modo eluso. Cinque anni dopo, quell'assunzione spiega perché le monete di privacy continuano a essere rimosse e perché le istituzioni si rifiutano di toccare la tecnologia blockchain anonima. Dusk è l'eccezione perché è stata costruita per questa realtà fin dall'inizio.

La regola di viaggio stessa è semplice. Le istituzioni finanziarie devono condividere le informazioni sui mittenti e sui destinatari per transazioni oltre determinate soglie. Le banche lo fanno già. Quando trasferisci denaro a livello internazionale, la tua identità viene condivisa con la banca ricevente. Quella informazione rimane riservata tra le istituzioni, ma è disponibile per la conformità e per le verifiche. Dusk rispecchia esattamente questo modello on-chain.

C'è un dettaglio nell'infografica dei trasferimenti protetti di Dusk che la maggior parte delle persone ha trascurato. Il destinatario può dimostrare criptograficamente chi li ha pagati. Sembra un fatto secondario all'inizio, ma quando si riflette su ciò che questo consente a Dusk nella finanza istituzionale, diventa una delle scelte architettoniche più importanti dell'intera rete.
La banca tradizionale già funziona in questo modo. Quando un bonifico arriva sul tuo conto, sai chi te l'ha inviato. La tua banca lo sa. I regolatori possono scoprire se hanno l'autorità adeguata. Ma il pubblico generale non può vedere i tuoi bonifici in arrivo e i concorrenti non possono monitorare i tuoi flussi di cassa. Questa è la base della privacy operativa, ed è esattamente il modello che Dusk sta cercando di ricreare sulla catena.

Ho seguito i lanci di Layer 1 per abbastanza tempo da individuare il modello. Grande supporto, tecnologia pulita, entusiasmo per il lancio, poi la parte difficile: convincere le persone a usare realmente la cosa. Plasma è stato lanciato a settembre 2025 con i soldi di Peter Thiel e il CEO di Tether coinvolto. $2 miliardi di liquidità al giorno uno. Tutti i segnali che persone serie stavano prestando attenzione.
Tre mesi dopo, $XPL si trova a $0.1351, in calo di circa l'88% dal picco di $1.88. Volume 24h intorno a $133.26M con il prezzo in calo dello 0.30% oggi. RSI a 38.69 mostra un territorio ipervenduto ma non livelli di capitolazione ancora. Quel crollo non è sorprendente. Ciò che è più interessante è ciò che sta accadendo sotto mentre tutti stanno osservando l'azione del prezzo.

I watched Walrus drop from $0.1631 to $0.1388 today. That's a 14.64% slide in 24 hours. Volume hit 12.47 million WAL tokens changing hands. RSI crashed to 25.52, which technically screams oversold. And yet, something about this selloff feels different from the usual crypto panic.
Most people see red candles and assume fear. Walrus holders dumping in desperation. Weak hands shaking out. The typical narrative. But when you actually look at how Walrus infrastructure works, a price drop like this creates dynamics that don't map cleanly to regular token selloffs.
Here's what caught my attention. Walrus storage pricing is denominated in WAL, but operators target fiat stability. That's not just a nice feature. It's structural. When WAL crashes 14.64% in a day, storage effectively gets cheaper for anyone buying capacity right now. Not by a little. By exactly that much.

Think about what that means for projects evaluating Walrus. Yesterday, storing a terabyte for an epoch cost X amount of WAL. Today it costs 14.64% less WAL for the same storage. The storage nodes didn't change their fiat pricing targets. The protocol didn't adjust epoch costs. But buyers just got a discount because the token dropped.
That's backwards from how most utility tokens work. Usually when a token crashes, the service gets more expensive in token terms to compensate. Walrus doesn't do that automatically. There's a lag. Storage nodes vote on pricing every epoch, and epochs last two weeks. So this entire drawdown happens inside a pricing window where capacity costs are fixed in WAL terms.
Which means anyone who needs Walrus storage right now is getting a better deal than they would have gotten yesterday. Not because Walrus is desperate for users. Just because of how the timing worked out.
I keep thinking about what happens to the WAL that does get spent on storage during this window. Some of it goes to node operators as revenue. Some gets burned. The burning mechanism is subtle but real. Walrus burns WAL through slashing penalties and certain fee structures. When storage activity happens while WAL is cheap, more tokens move through the burn pipeline relative to the fiat value being captured.
Put differently, Walrus might be burning more tokens per dollar of storage revenue today than it was three days ago. Not because usage spiked. Just because the token price fell and storage activity continued anyway.
That's deflationary pressure that nobody's calculating because everyone's staring at the 14.64% drop and making assumptions about sentiment.
The other piece that doesn't fit the panic narrative is where the volume actually is. 12.47 million WAL traded, which is real volume, not dust. But compare that to the circulating supply of 1.58 billion WAL. We're talking about less than 1% of circulating tokens changing hands during this entire selloff. That's not capitulation. That's specific holders exiting while most of the supply sits still.
Walrus node operators can't easily dump their stakes. They're locked into infrastructure commitments. You can't just unstake and sell instantly when you're running storage nodes with real users depending on uptime. The 105 operators spread across 17 countries aren't the ones selling today. They're probably buying WAL if anything, because their costs are in fiat and revenue is in WAL, and cheaper WAL means better margins.
Which brings up another uncomfortable question. If node operators benefit from cheaper WAL, and storage buyers benefit from cheaper WAL, who's actually hurt by this drop? Speculators who bought higher, obviously. But from a network functionality perspective, Walrus works better at $0.1388 than it did at $0.1631 for anyone actually using the storage.
That creates a tension most projects don't deal with. Walrus token holders want number to go up. Walrus users want costs to go down. Those aren't aligned. And days like today expose that misalignment clearly.

I pulled up the order book earlier. RSI at 25.52 means technically oversold, which usually triggers bounce speculation. But Walrus isn't behaving like a momentum play. The support at $0.1360 held on the initial dump, then gave way slightly to $0.1388. Not a violent breakdown. Just steady selling into what looks like patient buying.
Whoever bought at $0.1360 today locked in storage costs at a 14.64% discount compared to yesterday. If Walrus usage grows from here, they effectively front-ran an entire epoch of potentially higher demand at lower token cost. That's not a trade. That's a calculated infrastructure bet.
And then there's the part nobody wants to talk about. Walrus doesn't need the token to pump for the network to succeed. Storage nodes get paid in WAL but care about fiat revenue. Users pay WAL but care about storage capacity. The token is the coordination layer, not the value proposition. Which means Walrus can grow usage, expand capacity, onboard real applications, and the token could still chop sideways or down if demand for WAL itself doesn't keep pace.
That's deeply uncomfortable if you're holding WAL hoping for number go up. But it's actually healthy if you care about Walrus surviving long-term. Projects that need token appreciation to function eventually break when the market turns. Projects that work regardless of token price tend to outlast hype cycles.
Today's 14.64% drop might just be revealing that Walrus is more in the second category than people assumed. Storage keeps happening. Nodes keep running. Capacity keeps getting allocated. The token fell, and the network didn't blink.
I don't know if Walrus bounces from here or bleeds lower. RSI at 25.52 suggests oversold, but oversold can stay oversold. What I do know is that focusing only on the price action misses the more interesting dynamics happening underneath. Cheaper WAL makes storage more accessible. Burns keep happening. Infrastructure keeps expanding. And most of the supply isn't moving.
That doesn't guarantee anything. But it's different from the panic most people assume when they see red candles. Sometimes a selloff just reveals who's actually using something versus who was speculating on it. Today's Walrus chart might be doing exactly that.
@Walrus 🦭/acc #walrus $WAL

There's something genuinely strange happening with Walrus right now that most people aren't noticing. WAL is sitting at $0.1388 after a brutal 14.64% drop. Volume pushed past 12.47 million tokens in 24 hours. The chart looks like a typical altcoin bleed. But if you actually talk to anyone storing data on Walrus, their costs haven't moved.
That disconnect is weird enough that I spent the last few hours trying to understand how it's possible. Because in most crypto systems, when the token crashes, everything breaks. Either fees spike to compensate, or the network grinds to a halt, or node operators start dropping off. Walrus just keeps operating like nothing happened.
The answer sits in how Walrus handles pricing at the protocol level. Storage nodes don't set prices in WAL directly. They target fiat equivalents. Every epoch, operators vote on what they want to charge for capacity, and they're voting based on what makes sense in dollar terms. The protocol collects those votes, finds the 66.67th percentile, and that becomes the network price.

But here's the part that matters. That price gets locked for the entire epoch. Two full weeks. Once it's set, it doesn't move until the next epoch boundary, regardless of what WAL does in the meantime.
So when WAL dropped 14.64% today, we're still inside an epoch where pricing was set when WAL was higher. The amount of WAL required to buy storage was calculated days ago. Token crashes, but the storage cost in WAL terms stays exactly where it was.
From a user perspective, that creates an accidental discount. If you're buying Walrus storage right now, you're paying the WAL amount that was set when the token was worth more. But you're buying that WAL at current prices, which are 14.64% lower. Your storage just got cheaper in real terms, even though the protocol didn't change anything.
Walrus operators didn't plan for this. The system just has natural lag built in because epochs don't update pricing continuously. And that lag acts like a shock absorber when volatility hits.
Most projects would panic about this. Nodes might complain they're getting underpaid. Users might worry about sustainability. But Walrus operators committed to infrastructure with the understanding that pricing mechanisms smooth over time. They're not reacting to single-day moves. They're optimizing for multi-month averages.
Which brings up the uncomfortable reality of how Walrus node economics actually work. These operators aren't day trading the token. They staked WAL to participate. They deployed hardware. They pay for bandwidth and maintenance in fiat. A 14.64% drop in WAL price doesn't change their electricity bills or their hosting costs.
What it does change is their revenue measured in fiat terms. If storage fees come in as WAL, and WAL is worth less today, then revenue drops even though the amount of WAL collected stays the same. That's a direct hit to margins.
But here's where it gets interesting. Walrus operators also need to buy WAL to maintain their stakes. Some need to acquire more WAL for capacity expansion. When the token drops 14.64%, their acquisition costs drop by the same amount. They're simultaneously earning less in fiat terms and paying less to expand operations.
The net effect depends entirely on whether an operator is a net seller or net accumulator of WAL. Operators who immediately convert revenue to fiat get hurt by price drops. Operators who reinvest into expanding capacity benefit from cheaper tokens.
That creates a natural selection pressure. The nodes that survive long-term are the ones comfortable holding WAL through volatility. The ones treating Walrus like a fiat business with crypto payment rails probably exit during drawdowns like today's.
I keep coming back to the burn mechanics during these moments. Walrus burns WAL through slashing and certain fee structures. When storage activity continues at epoch-locked pricing while WAL tanks, the protocol is burning tokens that are worth less in fiat terms but represent the same storage capacity.
Put differently, Walrus might be burning more tokens per terabyte stored today than it was last week. Not because usage changed. Just because the token fell and pricing didn't adjust yet.
That's deflationary in token terms even if it's neutral in fiat terms. And it happens invisibly because everyone's staring at the price chart instead of the actual storage activity.
The 24-hour volume of 12.47 million WAL tells part of the story. That's real liquidity moving. But Walrus storage transactions don't show up in that volume the same way trading does. When someone pays for storage, WAL moves from their wallet to node operators and burn addresses. It's on-chain activity that doesn't always register as exchange volume.
So the actual economic activity happening on Walrus could be significantly higher than what the $1.83M USDT volume suggests. Storage purchases, stake delegations, node operator payouts—all of that moves WAL without necessarily hitting the trading volume metrics everyone watches.
Walrus pricing stability during token volatility isn't an accident. It's an intentional design choice. Epochs create predictability. Fiat-targeting prevents runaway costs. Delayed price updates smooth short-term chaos. The whole structure assumes that token volatility is normal and shouldn't break the storage layer.

Most projects don't design for that. They assume tokens will appreciate or stay stable. When volatility hits, systems break because nobody planned for 14.64% single-day drops. Walrus planned for exactly that scenario by decoupling storage pricing from real-time token prices.
The trade-off is that Walrus can't respond quickly to sustained price changes. If WAL bleeds for months, operators eventually vote for higher storage costs at the next epoch to maintain fiat margins. That makes storage more expensive in WAL terms, which could price out some users.
But in the short term, during single-day crashes like today, Walrus just absorbs the volatility without flinching. Storage costs stay stable. Nodes keep operating. Users keep uploading data. The token falls, and the network doesn't care.
That resilience is easy to miss when you're focused on charts. RSI at 25.52 looks oversold. The 14.64% drop looks scary. Volume at 12.47 million WAL seems significant. All true. But none of it changes the fact that Walrus storage pricing is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Whether that's enough to stabilize the token long-term is a different question. Walrus can operate fine with a bleeding token as long as storage demand grows. But holders who want price appreciation need more than stable operations. They need demand for WAL itself to outpace supply unlocks and selling pressure.
Today's price action doesn't answer that question. It just proves that Walrus built a storage layer that survives token volatility better than most people expected. Everything else is still uncertain.
@Walrus 🦭/acc #walrus $WAL