Walrus's Red Stuff, a two-dimensional (2D) erasure coding protocol that defines how data is converted for storage, is at the heart of Walrus, enabling efficient, secure, and highly available decentralized storage.
Red Stuff enables Walrus to solve for the traditional trade-offs of decentralized storage, providing security, replication efficiency, and fast data recovery.
By using a matrix-based encoding process to create primary and secondary slivers, Red Stuff enables lightweight "self-healing," which unlocks rapid data recovery using minimal network bandwidth.
For builders, Red Stuff’s innovation translates to a storage network that’s more cost-effective, performant, resilient, and scalable.
Walrus, a decentralized storage and data availability network, addresses the limitations of traditional decentralized storage methods through a number of technical innovations, which are tailored to support binary large object (blob) storage.
Walrus’s Red Stuff encoding protocol, which defines how data is converted for storage, is at the heart of how Walrus provides high availability and integrity for blobs at scale.
Centralized cloud storage, while performant, introduces single points of failure, censorship risks, and misaligned incentives. Decentralized storage networks aim to improve on this by providing a credibly-neutral system for persistent data, but they face a set of fundamental trade-offs in order to do so.
Red Stuff allows Walrus to directly address the traditional trade-offs of decentralized storage with high security and efficient, uninterrupted availability, even in the case of storage node churn and outages. Overcoming these tradeoffs allows Walrus to match the performance of centralized cloud storage solutions without sacrificing the benefits of decentralization.
