Walrus stops feeling like 'storage' the first time a Sui object reference outlives the assumption that created it.
At build time it looks clean. You ship an object that points at a blob.. you treat the reference like a handle, you move on. The app keeps its mental model: files are external, replaceable, quietly swappable if something changes.
Then composability shows up uninvited.
A downstream contract starts relying on that reference as if it is part of state. Not because anyone was reckless. Because it resolves cleanly, so people treat it like a promise. The reference works the blob is retrievable though and suddenly "this file" is not a payload anymore. It's a dependency. Something other code can anchor to.
Nothing trips a siren. The UI still loads as usual. That is what makes it sticky... there's no clean moment where you' are allowed to call it "broken'.
You notice it later, in release review when someone wants to tighten access scope, rotate a key, adjust ownership semantics... or revise how the app treats a long-lived data object. The request is normal. The effect is not though. Because the question isn't "can we change it". The question is "who else is depending on this staying the same.""
Walrus Protocol makes that harder to hand wave because the blob does notw quietly evaporate. The reference keeps living. If you shipped a shortcut as a composable storage primitive it is still out there next week. Still getting reused. Still treated as stable, because it behaved yesterday and nobody wants to be the first one to invalidate it honestly.
The first freeze is nott about throughput. It's about certainty.
Is this reference just ours. or did we accidentally export it as an interface? If we swap it, do we break some Move-based flow we don't even see? Or worse: it still resolves but it stops behaving like the thing anyone integrated and now it looks like we "lost" data we never promised to serve that way.
That's where teams start writing rules they didn't plan to write. Not governance. Runbook stuff. "Don't mutate this class of object." "Pin ownership semantics". And then the rest... exceptions, caveats, a checklist nobody wanted a hold-step that shows up whenever someone says "small change".
Walrus isn't the cause of that coupling though. @Walrus 🦭/acc just makes it durable enough that you can't pretend it istemporary. The reference 8keeps resolving. The network stays green. The ticket stays open anyway. #Walrus $WAL
