I’m looking at @Walrus 🦭/acc as a storage protocol, not as a marketing story. It is built for large blobs like media, datasets, app front ends, and other heavy files that do not belong in replicated blockchain state. Walrus keeps the actual bytes on a network of storage nodes, but it uses the Sui blockchain as the control layer for payments, lifetimes, and verifiable availability signals.
When you store a blob, the client encodes it with erasure coding into many smaller pieces and distributes those pieces across a storage committee. A reader does not need every piece; enough pieces can reconstruct the original, which helps the system stay online during outages and operator churn.
After storage nodes accept the upload, they collectively produce an availability certificate that is posted onchain, and this becomes the moment apps can point to as proof that the blob is available for a defined period. They’re also designing for the hard operational parts: committee membership changes in epochs, and the protocol is built to heal missing pieces without turning recovery into a bandwidth disaster. Developers use Walrus through client tooling and APIs, and they can renew storage by extending the blob’s lifetime before it expires, which lets long lived apps keep important data continuously available. The long term goal is to make storage a programmable primitive where contracts and services can reason about data availability, fund persistence over time, and reduce dependence on single providers, while keeping costs predictable and reliability measurable. Data is discoverable, so encryption and access control must be added by builders locally.