JOSEPH DESOZE

@Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL #Walrus
Quando le persone all'interno di un'azienda parlano onestamente di backup e ripristino dopo un disastro, raramente sembra una discussione tecnica pulita. Sembra emozionante, anche se nessuno lo dice apertamente. C'è sempre una paura silenziosa sotto i diagrammi e le politiche, la paura che, quando accadrà qualcosa di veramente grave, il piano di ripristino sembrerà buono sulla carta ma crollerà nella realtà. Ho visto questa paura manifestarsi dopo incidenti di ransomware, interruzioni regionali del cloud e semplici errori umani che si sono propagati ben oltre quanto chiunque avesse previsto. Walrus si inserisce in questa conversazione non come un sostituto appariscente di tutto ciò che gli team già utilizzano, ma come risposta a quella paura. È stato progettato con l'assunzione che i sistemi falliranno in modi disordinati, che non tutto sarà disponibile contemporaneamente e che il ripristino deve comunque funzionare anche quando le condizioni sono lontane dall'ideale.

@Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL #Walrus
I’m going to talk about Walrus in a way that feels like real life, because the reason it exists is not complicated once you’ve watched how digital products actually break: people build something onchain, they tell users they own it, and then the most important parts of the experience, the big files, the media, the datasets, the real “stuff” that gives an app its personality, end up living somewhere offchain where a single outage, a single policy shift, or a single operator can quietly decide what remains accessible and what disappears. Walrus was created to close that gap by offering decentralized storage for large unstructured data blobs while keeping the coordination and proof of that storage anchored to the Sui blockchain, and that combination matters because it tries to replace vague trust with something you can verify. They’re not pretending blockchains should store everything directly, because that would be inefficient and expensive, so Walrus separates roles in a way that makes sense: the storage network holds the heavy data, and Sui acts as the control layer that tracks ownership, lifetimes, and the onchain objects that represent each stored blob, which means a developer can build logic around data availability in the same place they build the rest of their application logic, and users can feel the difference between “someone says the file is stored” and “the network has publicly committed to keeping it available for a defined period.”

When a file is stored in Walrus, it doesn’t get placed intact onto a single machine, and it doesn’t get copied in full to every node either, because both extremes are either too fragile or too costly, so the protocol uses erasure coding to transform the file into many encoded fragments often described as slivers, then distributes those slivers across many independent storage operators. This is where the design starts to feel serious, because the system is built on the assumption that nodes will fail, connections will drop, and operators will come and go, and instead of pretending that is rare, Walrus engineers for it by making recovery possible even when a large portion of those fragments are missing. That resilience is one of the main reasons people pay attention to Walrus: it aims to keep the effective redundancy closer to modern cost realities while still making the data recoverable under harsh conditions, and if it becomes widely used, most users will never talk about the encoding at all, they will simply feel the quiet relief of data that remains retrievable when it matters. The moment the blob becomes “real” in the system is not just when fragments are uploaded, it is when the protocol produces an onchain Proof of Availability certificate through Sui, which functions as a verifiable marker that the network has accepted the storage obligation, and that detail is more than technical ceremony, because it gives applications and users a shared reference point for what the network promised to do.

WAL exists inside this machine as more than a symbol, because decentralized storage without incentives is just a story that collapses under pressure, and Walrus ties incentives to accountability through staking, delegation, and performance consequences. Storage nodes put WAL at risk to participate, and token holders can delegate stake to help secure the network, which creates a practical alignment where operators earn rewards for providing reliable service, and poor performance can lead to penalties, which is the economic backbone that tries to turn reliability into a habit rather than a hope. I like that the project also frames payments in a way that aims to keep storage costs stable in fiat terms, because if you’ve ever tried to budget infrastructure in a volatile environment, you know how quickly a good idea becomes unusable when costs swing wildly, and this is one of those design choices that signals they’re thinking about actual builders trying to ship products, not only traders looking for a narrative. We’re seeing more projects realize that usability is not only about speed, it is about predictable operations, predictable pricing, and predictable guarantees, and Walrus is trying to deliver those guarantees through a blend of cryptographic proofs, distributed storage, and economic enforcement.

If you want to understand Walrus beyond hype, it helps to watch the things that would hurt if they went wrong, because storage is unforgiving in a way that many other crypto primitives are not. You watch whether the network is actually being used for real data, whether the number of independent operators is growing in a healthy way, whether stake distribution stays sufficiently diverse so the system does not drift into quiet centralization, and whether availability and recovery remain dependable during churn and stress, because those are the moments where a network proves it is infrastructure rather than a demo. At the same time, it is fair to acknowledge the risks, because they’re real: the protocol has to maintain reliable retrieval performance as it scales, incentives have to stay aligned as early subsidies evolve, and adoption is tied to the broader success of the Sui ecosystem because Sui is the coordination layer that makes Walrus programmable and verifiable. Still, if it becomes what it is reaching for, Walrus could help normalize a world where people store valuable data without that low-grade fear that it can vanish because one entity changed its mind, and that future is not about drama, it is about steady trust earned through boring reliability. I’m They’re If It becomes We’re seeing all point to the same simple hope here: that the tools we build can respect what people create by keeping it available, provable, and resilient, and that is an inspiring direction for decentralized technology to grow into.

@Dusk $DUSK #Dusk
La Fondazione Dusk è stata fondata nel 2018 con un obiettivo molto concreto che risulta facile da comprendere una volta immaginato come funzionano le istituzioni finanziarie reali, perché banche, borse e aziende regolamentate non possono operare in un mondo in cui ogni movimento di valore diventa informazione pubblica per sempre, ed è per questo che Dusk si concentra sulle finanze regolamentate con la privacy integrata fin dall'inizio. Non parlo di privacy come un trucco per eludere le regole, parlo di privacy come un'aspettativa normale che protegge i clienti, protegge la strategia aziendale e protegge la stabilità del mercato, pur consentendo un controllo legale e tracce di audit pulite quando necessario. Dusk si presenta come una blockchain di livello 1 pensata per l'infrastruttura finanziaria regolamentata e focalizzata sulla privacy, e il cuore dell'idea è semplice: stiamo vedendo un futuro in cui le istituzioni vogliono l'efficienza della blockchain, ma non sono disposte a sacrificare la riservatezza per ottenerla, quindi Dusk cerca di rendere privacy e conformità parte dello stesso sistema invece di due nemici che si combattono tra loro.

@Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL #Walrus
Walrus exists because the modern internet runs on heavy data, not just text, and most of that heavy data still lives in places where a single company can change the price, change the policy, or remove access, and even when we build on blockchains, the “ownership” often ends up pointing to something stored somewhere else that can quietly disappear. Walrus was designed to make that weak link feel stronger by splitting responsibilities in a way that matches reality: the blockchain should coordinate, verify, and enforce commitments, while a specialized network should hold the actual bytes in a resilient way that can survive node failures and real-world messiness. In Walrus’s own positioning, it is a decentralized storage protocol meant to turn storage into something more programmable and useful for modern applications, and it anchors that programmability on Sui so commitments, metadata, and incentives can be handled on-chain while the large blobs remain off-chain.

Walrus works by treating storage like a commitment rather than a casual upload, because storage becomes meaningful only when you can trust it over time. First, the protocol uses Sui as the control layer where storage resources and blob references can be represented and managed, which is how applications can program around stored data without forcing the chain itself to hold massive files. Then the file is encoded into many smaller pieces and distributed across a set of independent storage nodes instead of being replicated as full copies everywhere, because the goal is to keep costs down while keeping availability high. Walrus describes this encoded distribution as the basis for cost efficiency, with storage overhead around five times the blob size using erasure coding, which is far more practical than traditional full replication at scale. After the pieces are placed, the system produces an availability proof that gets anchored on Sui, and that becomes the public receipt that the network accepted custody under the rules of the protocol, so if a node later fails to serve or maintain what it committed to, the protocol can treat it as accountable behavior rather than an unfortunate accident. When someone retrieves the file, they do not need every piece, they only need enough valid pieces to reconstruct the original, and it becomes a very different reliability model than hoping one server is still around, because the system is built to tolerate missing pieces and churn as a normal condition.

At the center of Walrus is a two-dimensional erasure coding approach called Red Stuff, and this is not a decorative detail, it is the reason the protocol can promise strong resilience without drowning in replication costs. Walrus explains Red Stuff as the encoding engine that converts blobs into stored pieces in a way designed to overcome the typical tradeoff in decentralized storage where you either waste enormous space with replication or you create painful recovery bottlenecks with traditional erasure coding. The academic paper on Walrus describes Red Stuff as achieving high security with roughly a 4.5x replication factor and self-healing where recovery bandwidth is proportional to the amount of data actually lost, which is exactly the kind of property you want in a network where nodes can go offline, machines can fail, and the protocol must keep repairing itself without constantly pulling entire files across the network. I’m focusing on this because storage networks do not fail only when attackers show up, they’re more likely to fail when ordinary operational churn piles up, and Red Stuff is Walrus’s bet that it can make staying healthy cheap enough to be sustained for years.

WAL exists to pay for storage, secure the node set, and align behavior through staking and rewards, because decentralized storage only works when operators are economically motivated to do the boring work consistently. The Walrus Foundation’s materials and ecosystem explainers describe a fixed maximum supply of 5 billion WAL and an initial circulating supply of 1.25 billion, with distribution buckets that include community reserve, user distribution, subsidies, core contributors, and investors, which is the kind of structure that tries to balance long-term ecosystem funding with the reality that builders and operators need incentives from day one. Walrus also describes the payment model as being designed so storage costs can remain stable in fiat terms even when the token price moves, which is important because no serious developer wants their storage bill to become a speculative roller coaster, and if that stability holds, it becomes easier for real applications to plan long horizons rather than chasing short-term yield.

If you want to understand whether Walrus is turning into real infrastructure, the most honest signals are network scale, usage, reliability, and decentralization, not hype. One concrete snapshot reported that Walrus mainnet had 4,167 TB of total storage capacity with about 26% in use, across 103 operators and 121 storage nodes, and while any single snapshot is not a verdict, it gives a baseline for whether the system is actually running with meaningful participation. Over time, the metrics that matter are whether total capacity keeps growing, whether utilization rises in a healthy way, whether retrieval stays fast and dependable under load, whether repair bandwidth stays manageable during churn, and whether staking and delegation remain distributed enough that the network does not quietly centralize. On the economic side, I would watch the balance between subsidies and organic fees, because we’re seeing many networks struggle when incentive programs fade, and the ones that last are the ones that become genuinely useful so real users keep paying for real service.

Walrus is ambitious, and ambition comes with risks that deserve to be said out loud. The protocol’s design leans on Sui for its control plane, which is powerful for programmability and coordination, but it also means the storage system inherits dependency risk from the underlying chain’s stability and governance. There is also technical risk in any novel encoding and distributed verification system, because edge cases only reveal themselves under time, scale, and adversarial pressure, and while Red Stuff is designed to make recovery efficient, the real test is sustained operation across years of churn. There is adoption risk too, because decentralized storage is competitive and developers only commit their most valuable data when the tooling is smooth and the reliability story is earned in public, not promised in private. Still, the direction Walrus is aiming for makes sense in a world where data keeps growing and AI keeps amplifying the value of datasets, provenance, and persistent access, and that is why the project drew major attention around its funding and mainnet milestone. If Walrus keeps proving that its availability commitments are dependable, and if WAL incentives stay aligned with long-term reliability rather than short-term extraction, it becomes easier to imagine storage as something that feels owned and composable rather than rented and fragile, and that shift tends to unlock better building because people take bigger creative risks when they believe their work will still be there tomorrow.

In the end, Walrus is trying to make a very human promise using very technical tools: you should be able to build, publish, and store what matters without living in fear of invisible dependencies, and if the protocol keeps moving in that direction, we’re not just getting another network, we’re getting a calmer foundation for the next generation of apps.