The fact that Walrus Protocol raised a substantial amount of money was not only a headline event, but it was also a structural one. Storage infrastructure is a capital-intensive kind of system. It demands long run planning, good incentives on the operators of nodes and the capability to support the actual growth of data before revenue becomes relevant. Storage networks in contrast to short-cycle applications cannot afford to rely on spikes in adoption to maintain their existence.
The capital that Walrus had raised provides it with the option to focus on reliability rather than speed. It lets the team make investments in network resilience, network security audits, ecosystem tooling, and long term research rather than sprint features to get a hit. Such a financial support is particularly important in infrastructures that cannot afford to go off at the end of several market cycles.
My opinion is that capital depth is a kind of trust. With it, Walrus eliminates protocol level risk of execution.