Walrus just pulled in $140 million from Standard Crypto and a16z, and they're not wasting any time. Built on the Sui blockchain, Walrus is all about fast, private storage for big chunks of data—think AI workloads or massive enterprise files. This funding round comes at a moment when Web3 really needs tough, reliable storage, especially as AI and enterprise use explode heading into 2026.

At the heart of Walrus is something called Red Stuff encoding. It's a type of fountain code that chops up data into endless “slivers” and spreads them out across a network of staked nodes all over the world. The cool part? You only need a subset of those slivers to piece everything back together—so you get crazy-fast, sub-second access times, and you don’t have to worry about any single machine going down and wrecking your data.

The WAL token runs the show here. People use it to pay for storage (with a 0.5% burn rate baked in to keep the supply in check), stake it to keep the network secure, and vote on upgrades that could make things even snappier. By January 2026, over a billion WAL tokens were staked, which says a lot about how much confidence investors have in the whole thing.

Walrus isn’t just sitting still, either. They’ve teamed up with Talus to power AI agents and with Itheum to help tokenize data, setting themselves up as a backbone for fast, trustworthy data markets.

Picture an AI lab crunching huge streams of real-time data. With Walrus, they split those streams into slivers, fire them into the network, and Sui smart contracts handle the sharing instantly. Training cycles get shorter, costs drop, and there’s no single point of failure like you get with old-school cloud storage.

What’s the big picture? Walrus offers high-speed storage that fits perfectly with AI-driven businesses, thanks to their clever coding and token incentives. Sure, you need to put some money down if you want top-tier performance, but for a lot of users, that’s a price worth paying.


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