When I encountered Sites, I understood that they deal with a primary shortcoming of Web3. Most decentralized applications continue to rely on centralized hosting of their frontends, creating risks such as downtime, censorship or loss of control. Created on the Walrus Protocol and the Sui blockchain, Walrus Sites are a genuinely decentralized platform that allows hosting websites and dApp interfaces.
The Walrus Sites Foundation.
Walrus Sites place all web resources, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images, among others, in blobs in the Walrus decentralized storage system. This is based on efficient erasure coding to spread data over independent nodes with low replication overhead, and high availability and resilience are guaranteed. Sui blockchain has metadata, ownership, and entry points that are controlled using smart contracts, allowing the site to be programmable and transferable like any other object on-chain.
The way they allow complete decentralization.
The Walrus Sites enable developers to make use of either the static or dynamic frontend, without server, by decoupling storage and coordination. Access occurs by means of normal browsers by using gateways such as wal.app subdomains or custom domains which are usually connected with SuiNS to resolve them. This is a censorship resistant setup with global availability because the information is accessible even in situations of node failures. The content developers are able to update the content by releasing new blobs whilst maintain ownership responsibility on Sui.
Real World Value for dApps
Walrus Sites already serve as completely on chain experiences (documentation portals, staking interfaces, community apps) in projects. Examples are such websites as docs.wal.app and stake wal.wal.app which show how hosting can work in practice without points of failure. This infrastructure is available to support more heavily media, dynamic NFTs and end facing interfaces reliably and at lower costs as more dApps on Sui and beyond are interested in end-to-end decentralization.
Personally, I believe that Walrus Sites are a positive step in the right direction of providing decentralized applications with more accessibility and durability. They redirect the partial decentralization to wholesome solutions that can be developed by developers with a lot of certainty.
