JOSEPH DESOZE

@Walrus 🦭/acc $WAL #Walrus
Gdy ludzie wewnątrz firmy rozmawiają szczerymi słowami o kopii zapasowej i odzyskiwaniu po katastrofie, rzadko wygląda to jak czysta dyskusja techniczna. Wydaje się emocjonalne, nawet jeśli nikt nie mówi tego głośno. Zawsze pod powierzchnią pojawia się cichy strach, strach, że gdy coś naprawdę złego się wydarzy, plan odzyskiwania będzie wyglądał dobrze na papierze, ale rozpadnie się w rzeczywistości. Widziałem ten strach po incydentach z ransomware, awariach chmury regionalnej i prostych błędach ludzkich, które miały skutki znacznie większe, niż ktoś mógł przewidzieć. Walrus wchodzi w tę rozmowę nie jako błyszcząca alternatywa dla wszystkiego, co zespoły już używają, ale jako odpowiedź na ten strach. Był stworzony z założenia, że systemy mogą się zawieść w chaotyczny sposób, że nie wszystko będzie dostępne jednocześnie i że odzyskiwanie musi działać nawet wtedy, gdy warunki są dalekie od optymalnych.

@Dusk $DUSK #Dusk
Dusk Foundation has been building since 2018 with a very grounded goal that feels easy to understand once you imagine how real financial institutions operate, because banks, exchanges, and regulated companies cannot work in a world where every movement of value becomes public information forever, and that is why Dusk focuses on regulated finance with privacy built in from the start. I’m not talking about privacy as a trick to avoid rules, I’m talking about privacy as the normal expectation that protects customers, protects business strategy, and protects market stability, while still allowing lawful oversight and clean audit trails when they’re required. Dusk presents itself as a Layer 1 blockchain designed for regulated and privacy-focused financial infrastructure, and the heart of the idea is simple: we’re seeing a future where institutions want blockchain efficiency, but they’re not willing to sacrifice confidentiality to get it, so Dusk tries to make privacy and compliance feel like part of the same system instead of two enemies fighting each other.

Most blockchains were designed around radical transparency, and that can be great for public verification, but it becomes a problem the moment you place serious regulated activity on-chain, because competitors can track positions, bots can react to behavior, and ordinary people can be turned into targets simply because their financial life is visible. Dusk was built to remove that barrier by treating privacy and compliance as first-class features, not optional add-ons, so institutions can do regulated things on-chain while still keeping confidential details protected. If it becomes successful, it will not be because it made privacy loud, it will be because it made privacy normal, and that distinction matters, because real finance does not want chaos, it wants controlled disclosure, controlled risk, and predictable settlement, and Dusk is essentially trying to translate those expectations into blockchain rules.

One of the easiest ways to understand Dusk is to think in terms of selective visibility, because most people do not want their financial life broadcast, yet regulators and auditors still need proof that rules were followed and markets are not being abused. Dusk leans on modern cryptography, including zero-knowledge techniques, so the network can verify that transactions are valid without forcing every sensitive detail into public view, and then it supports the concept of transparency when needed, which means that under the right legal and operational conditions, authorized parties can see what must be seen. This is the emotional difference between “privacy as a hiding place” and “privacy as a seatbelt,” because one implies wrongdoing and the other implies safety, and Dusk is clearly aiming for the second.

The way Dusk is structured also tells you what it values, because it is designed as a modular stack rather than a single monolith that tries to do everything at once. The base layer focuses on settlement, consensus, and the guarantees that matter for financial infrastructure, while execution environments sit above it so applications can be built with familiar developer workflows. This modularity is not just engineering style; it is a risk and governance choice, because regulated markets need stability at the settlement layer while still allowing application logic and developer tooling to evolve at a reasonable pace. This is also why Dusk supports an Ethereum-style environment for smart contracts, because it lowers friction for developers who already know how to write, test, and audit EVM contracts, and if we’re being practical, adoption often depends less on who has the cleverest cryptography and more on who makes building feel natural for real teams.

When a transaction moves through Dusk, the system is designed to support both transparent and privacy-preserving flows, because real markets need both, and forcing everything into one mode usually breaks something important. A user or application forms a transaction, the network propagates it, and validators finalize it into a block through a structured proof-of-stake process that is meant to provide fast and dependable finality. If the transaction is meant to be confidential, the cryptography proves correctness without exposing the sensitive parts in plain text, and if the transaction is meant to be public, it can remain public to support integrations and transparency needs. The reason this step-by-step flow matters is that financial infrastructure depends on predictability, and Dusk’s vision is that once settlement is finalized, it should stay finalized in a way that feels dependable enough to build real obligations on top of, because in regulated contexts “probably final” is not the standard people want to rely on.

This is where Dusk’s focus on finality becomes more important than simple speed, because in finance, speed without certainty just creates faster confusion. If it becomes a serious platform for regulated assets, the network has to behave like infrastructure, meaning stable block production, consistent finalization, clear validator responsibilities, and an operating model that does not require heroic trust. That is why I keep using the word normal, because the biggest psychological barrier for institutions is not curiosity about new tech, it is fear of operational unpredictability, and Dusk is trying to remove that fear by designing settlement to be boring in the best way, like a bridge you drive over every day without thinking about it.

Dusk’s ambition naturally points toward tokenized real-world assets and compliant market activity, because those are the areas where privacy and auditability both matter at the same time. The long-term picture is that regulated instruments can be issued, traded, and settled on-chain with rules embedded into how the asset behaves, so ownership, restrictions, corporate actions, and reporting can be handled more cleanly than in fragmented legacy systems that still rely on manual reconciliation and slow settlement cycles. If it becomes We’re seeing this kind of shift, it will show up as markets that settle faster, processes that automate cleanly, and systems that reduce friction without reducing accountability, because the chain is not trying to erase regulation, it is trying to make regulated activity more efficient and more programmable while still respecting confidentiality.

If you want to evaluate Dusk in a way that matches its mission, the metrics are less about short-term hype and more about whether the network is being used like regulated infrastructure. We should watch sustained transaction activity that reflects real workflows rather than temporary spikes, we should watch network participation and stability because proof-of-stake systems depend on healthy validator operations, and we should watch whether regulated pilots and partnerships turn into consistent operational behavior, because in regulated finance the difference between a concept and infrastructure is whether it keeps working week after week while audits, reporting, and real users stress the system. We should also watch developer adoption at the application layer, because if developers are not building meaningful products, the best settlement layer in the world stays empty, and that is why the combination of privacy technology and familiar development workflows matters.

Dusk also faces real risks, and it is better to name them than to pretend they are not there. The biggest risk is time, because regulated adoption moves slowly and can be delayed by legal review, operational readiness, and integration complexity even when the technology is strong. Another risk is engineering complexity, because privacy-capable systems have a larger surface area, and any serious flaw in a regulated context becomes a trust issue, not just a technical issue. There is ecosystem risk too, because competition is growing in tokenization and privacy infrastructure, and Dusk will be compared on reliability, clarity, developer experience, and how smoothly institutions can adopt it without turning every integration into a custom research project. If it becomes successful, it will be because it keeps making difficult technology feel simple and dependable to the people who need it most.

I’m not here to promise that any one chain is guaranteed to dominate, because finance is too complex and regulation is too real for easy certainty, but I do think there is something genuinely hopeful in what Dusk is trying to do. They’re building toward a world where privacy is treated like a normal human need rather than a suspicious exception, where compliance is treated like a real requirement rather than an inconvenience, and where blockchain becomes less of a spectacle and more of a foundation. If it becomes real at scale, it will not feel like a loud revolution, it will feel like a steady improvement, where markets quietly run with less friction, faster settlement, and stronger protections for confidentiality and accountability, and that is the kind of progress worth believing in.

@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.