XRP is still under pressure. Price is trading below the 7, 25, and 99 EMAs, and it’s hovering close to the 24-hour low — a clear sign that sellers are in control.
As long as price stays below the key averages, rallies look like sell opportunities. Manage risk, stay disciplined, and let the setup do the work.$XRP Short Bias in Play👇 {future}(XRPUSDT) #xrp #MarketRebound #XRPRealityCheck #WriteToEarnUpgrade
Plasma’s Quiet Comeback: Scaling Ethereum Without the Data Weight
Plasma was originally designed to tackle Ethereum’s most stubborn issue: data availability. Rollups made big progress by moving execution off-chain, but they still depend on Ethereum to publish transaction data. That dependency creates a cost floor no matter how efficient execution becomes. Plasma took a bolder route—keep transaction data entirely off-chain and anchor only cryptographic commitments to Layer 1. For a long time, this idea felt ahead of its time. Exit games were complex, users had to stay alert, and the risk of data withholding scared most developers away. Plasma slowly faded while rollups took center stage. But things have changed. With zero-knowledge proofs, stateless validation, and designs like INTMAX’s Plasma Next, many of Plasma’s old weaknesses are finally being addressed. Users no longer need to constantly monitor the chain, and validity can be enforced cryptographically. The result isn’t a replacement for rollups, but a powerful alternative. Plasma shines where fees must be almost zero—payments, gaming, and social apps. It feels less like a comeback, and more like unfinished work finally catching up with reality. @Plasma $XPL #Plasma
Plasma isn’t “dead” anymore. With ZK proofs and stateless design, Plasma Next keeps data off-chain, cuts fees to near zero, and opens new doors for payments, gaming, and social apps on Ethereum. @Plasma #plasma $XPL #WriteToEarnUpgrade
DuskTrade: a regulated gateway for tokenized assets. KYC, region-based access, and privacy meet compliance. On-chain RWAs without breaking the law. #dusk $DUSK @Dusk
DuskTrade: a regulated gateway for tokenized assets. KYC, region-based access, and privacy meet compliance. On-chain RWAs without breaking the law. #dusk $DUSK @Dusk
Dusk: Why I Think Privacy Is Blockchain’s Missing Piece
Lately, I’ve been stuck in that familiar crypto loop—scrolling endlessly, reading threads, jumping from DeFi to NFTs to RWAs. The more I consumed, the stranger it felt. So many projects chasing whatever is hot, sprinting toward trends without stopping to ask why. It reminded me of kids running after kites—lots of movement, not much direction.
Then I stumbled onto Dusk.
No hype videos. No flashy promises. Just documentation, technical discussions, and a community that actually talks about problems instead of price. I paused. Something clicked. Dusk wasn’t selling excitement—it was addressing a question that had been sitting in my head for over a year: can blockchain privacy be useful in the real world without turning into chaos?
That question matters more than people admit.
What pulled me into crypto in the first place was freedom. No banks asking questions. No middlemen watching every move. You own your assets. You decide. But there’s a catch we all learned the hard way—public blockchains expose everything. Your balance. Your history. Who you interact with. Once someone links your address to you, the curtain is gone.
That might be fine for small experiments. It’s unbearable for serious money.
Privacy coins tried to fix this, but most went to extremes. Full anonymity that regulators reject outright. Or clever tech that breaks down when you scale it to real financial use. Dusk took a different path. From the start, it accepted a hard truth: privacy and compliance aren’t enemies—they have to work together.
One line from their whitepaper stayed with me: “Privacy by default, with selective disclosure.”
Simple words. Big idea.
Your transactions and smart contracts stay private by default. No one sees your balances or positions. But when you need to prove something—to an auditor, a regulator, or a counterparty—you can reveal only what’s required. Nothing more. Zero-knowledge proofs make that possible. You prove a fact without exposing the data behind it. Like saying, “Yes, I qualify,” without handing over your entire financial life.
Dusk doesn’t bolt this on as an extra feature. It builds it directly into smart contracts. Their Confidential Smart Contracts encrypt the whole execution process—inputs, outputs, balances—while the network still verifies everything is correct. That’s not easy tech. I won’t pretend I understood it instantly. Zero-knowledge proofs twist your brain at first. But once it clicks, you realize how powerful this approach is.
Naturally, my mind jumped to use cases.
Borrowing without broadcasting your position to competitors. Trading RWAs without exposing ownership details to the entire world. Institutions operating on-chain without breaking compliance rules.
In traditional finance, this takes layers of intermediaries and endless paperwork. On Dusk, it happens on-chain, protected by cryptography. That’s the kind of solution institutions actually care about—not speed for speed’s sake, but safety, control, and clarity.
I’ve never been a big Layer 1 maximalist. Solana is fast—until it isn’t. Ethereum is massive—but fees and constant upgrades wear you down. Dusk feels more focused. It’s built specifically for financial use cases. Its consensus mechanism, Segregated Byzantine Agreement, blends PoS with optimized zero-knowledge proofs. Transactions are quick. Fees stay low. And most importantly, the network has been stable for years.
What really caught my attention is what’s coming next: DuskEVM, expected between late 2025 and early 2026. Full EVM compatibility. That means Ethereum developers can migrate without rewriting everything—and instantly gain privacy features. That’s a smart move. Lower friction brings real builders, not just curiosity.
As for the token, I don’t see $DUSK as a casino chip. It has clear roles: gas fees, staking, governance. Staking rewards aren’t wild, but they’re steady. Token emissions are controlled. No aggressive dilution. I’ve allocated a portion myself—not chasing a pump, just backing infrastructure I actually believe in.
Zoom out to 2026, and the picture gets interesting. RWAs are growing fast. Institutions are circling. But privacy is still the weak spot. Many chains talk about compliance without meaning it. Dusk goes further. Partnerships with Chainlink bring regulatory-grade data on-chain. Citadel, their zero-knowledge KYC system, lets users prove compliance without handing over all their personal data. That’s the balance most projects never reach.
Of course, Dusk isn’t perfect. The ecosystem is still small. TVL isn’t explosive. dApps are growing, but slowly. And honestly, I’m okay with that. It feels like quiet construction instead of loud marketing. The community discussions reflect that—more engineering, less shouting.
I keep coming back to one thought: without real privacy, blockchain stays a toy. Fun to experiment with. Hard to trust with serious capital. Dusk offers a different future—where everyday users and institutions can interact with private, compliant, on-chain finance without compromise.
That’s not a fantasy. It’s being built, step by step.
I’m not here to predict price charts or promise moonshots. I’m here because this direction matters. In a market full of noise, Dusk made me stop and think about what privacy actually means. Not secrecy for bad actors—but control for ordinary people. The right to decide who sees your financial life.
That’s a right worth building for.
I’ll keep watching closely. Maybe more partnerships land. Maybe one killer application changes everything. Either way, Dusk has earned my attention. Years from now, it might be one of those projects people wish they had studied earlier—not because of hype, but because it quietly solved a problem everyone else avoided.
Walrus and the Quiet Return of Data Ownership
Lately, I’ve been roaming around the Sui ecosystem with no clear agenda. Just exploring. But running into Walrus felt less like casual browsing and more like an unexpected intellectual collision. One of those moments where you stop scrolling and actually lean back in your chair.
The name made me smile at first. Walrus doesn’t sound like serious infrastructure. But the deeper I went, the more I felt I was looking at something close to a turning point for decentralized storage—especially in an age where AI is devouring data at an insane pace. It pushed me to ask a question we often repeat but rarely confront honestly: are we really ready to take back control of our data?
For years, “data sovereignty” has been a nice slogan in crypto. In reality, most of our files still sit on centralized cloud servers. A policy change, a server failure, or a random account ban can wipe things out instantly. As datasets grow from gigabytes into hundreds of gigabytes—videos, images, audio, training data—the cracks in traditional storage become impossible to ignore.
I tried looking for answers before. IPFS felt fragile: slow access, unstable retrieval, nodes disappearing. Arweave’s idea of permanent storage is beautiful, but the cost puts it out of reach for most people. Filecoin is powerful, but its incentive system is complex enough to scare off regular users. What’s been missing is a solution that’s fast, affordable, and reliable without being a headache.
That’s where Walrus surprised me.
Built on Sui’s high-parallel execution and the Move language, Walrus takes a different approach. Large files are stored as blobs, but the real magic is in how redundancy is handled. Instead of brute-force replication, it uses erasure coding. Data is split, distributed across nodes, and can be reconstructed even if parts of the network fail. What impressed me most is the efficiency—Walrus achieves strong fault tolerance with only 4–5x redundancy, while others often need ten or even twenty times. That’s not a small tweak. It’s a structural improvement.
When I uploaded a 4K video and several high-res images on the testnet, I honestly didn’t expect much. But the upload was fast. Smooth. And the cost? So low it barely registered. In that moment, something clicked. If this scales, I no longer need to depend on centralized cloud storage. No surprise price hikes. No fear of losing access overnight. My data is on-chain. Access control stays with me. Sharing is as simple as sending a link.
Even more exciting is that storage on Walrus is programmable. Smart contracts can interact with the data directly. Files stop being static objects and start behaving like real assets—versioned, permissioned, tradable. Data isn’t just “stored” anymore. It becomes active. Useful. Alive. That feels like the shift we’ve been waiting for.
Now add AI to the picture, and things get really interesting.
AI agents need constant access to large datasets. Reading, writing, updating. Centralized storage will eventually become a bottleneck. Some projects, like Talus, are already using Walrus to store models and data. Moving this information on-chain makes it reliable, verifiable, and governable. I can easily imagine a future where your AI assistant pulls years of memories—photos, chats, notes—from the chain and turns them into something personal, meaningful, even emotional. That’s a very different future from today’s cold, opaque cloud services.
Of course, none of this works without a solid economic model. This is where $WAL feels thoughtfully designed. You prepay storage using $WAL , and fees are released gradually to nodes and stakers. This smooths out price swings and keeps storage costs predictable. The team has also set aside subsidies so early users aren’t priced out, while node operators are still rewarded. It’s a careful balance, and it shows.
Staking is refreshingly simple. Delegate $WAL , help secure the network, earn rewards. Governance sits with token holders, and over 60% of the supply is allocated to the community through airdrops, subsidies, and reserves. The team didn’t grab an outsized share, which tells me they’re thinking long term, not fast exits. That said, I’m not blindly bullish. Walrus is still growing. Node count needs to expand. Applications take time to mature. Sui itself is young, and its user base is smaller than Ethereum’s. For Walrus to really break out, more developers need to build on top of it. Still, its positioning feels right. Data is the fuel of the AI era, and efficient, trustworthy storage is becoming non-negotiable. The team’s background at Mysten Labs gives me confidence they understand the scale of what they’re trying to do.
I don’t hold $WAL because I expect a dramatic price explosion. I hold it because it solves a real problem. In the future, Web3 games with massive assets, metaverse 3D models, complex DeFi datasets, and even social media files could all live on Walrus. As costs drop, decentralized storage stops being a luxury and becomes something ordinary people can actually use. Late at night, when I see news about centralized storage breaches or sudden service shutdowns, I feel quietly reassured. Not because I think I’m smarter than anyone else, but because after using Walrus for a while, that feeling of control becomes hard to give up. Choosing where your data lives. Deciding how it’s used. That sense of ownership is something centralized systems simply can’t replicate.
I’m writing this not to predict the future, but to record a real experience. No one knows how this story ends. But I plan to keep watching Walrus grow. Years from now, it might turn out to be one of those pieces of infrastructure everyone relies on without even thinking about it.
If decentralized storage matters to you, it’s worth a closer look. Read the docs. Upload a few files. Feel what it’s like to actually own your data. Fair warning—it’s a little addictive. #dusk $DUSK @Dusk
Walrus: When Decentralized Storage Finally Feels Real
Costs come down naturally as the system scales. Even better is how recovery works. Instead of shouting requests across the entire network, Walrus pulls data from the closest available nodes. Fewer hops. Less waste. Much faster results. It’s one of those design choices that sounds simple, but makes a huge difference in real use.
Then there’s Seal Storage. This is where things get serious. It adds an identity-based lock to your data. Everything is encrypted, and only approved users can open it. No guessing. No broad exposure. For sensitive files—research, private media, AI data, or business records—this kind of control isn’t optional. It’s mandatory.
The roadmap hints at something bigger too: cross-chain expansion. Once that goes live, Walrus won’t be limited to Sui. It becomes reactive. Interoperable. Capable of plugging into multiple ecosystems at once. That’s when storage stops being a feature and starts behaving like shared infrastructure.
But the part that really grabs me is its native support for AI agents.
Picture this: your AI assistant has its own memory vault, stored entirely on Walrus. Switch devices? Nothing breaks. Change platforms? No resets. The memory stays intact, owned by you or the agent itself. No centralized cloud. No silent data harvesting. That kind of continuity simply doesn’t exist in today’s cloud models.
Of course, let’s stay grounded. Crypto is volatile. $WAL moves with the market, just like everything else. That’s unavoidable. What matters more to me is the foundation. The team comes from Mysten Labs. Funding has been steady, not reckless. And if you watch @walrusprotocol updates, it’s clear they’re shipping real work—technical progress, not empty noise.
I’ve gone on long enough already. But to bring it back to the core idea: my confidence in Walrus isn’t coming from hype cycles or trending hashtags. It comes from where the project sits. Right at the crossroads of data freedom, reliability, and real programmability.
Big words, sure. But Walrus is quietly turning them into something you can actually use.
If decentralized storage is on your radar, it’s worth checking out Walrus . Try the tools. Watch how $WAL evolves. This might not scream for attention—but infrastructure never does, until everyone depends on it. #dusk $DUSK @Dusk #MarketRebound #StrategyBTCPurchase #BTC100kNext? #USDemocraticPartyBlueVault
You Really Need to See Walrus for What It Is—and What It’s Quietly Becoming
After enough years doing due diligence in Web3, one habit sticks with you: don’t fall in love with the headline numbers.
Walrus has plenty of those. $140 million raised. A $2 billion valuation. Mysten Labs in the background.
All impressive. None decisive. What actually matters is whether a team can execute when the market shifts, defend its position when competitors wake up, and adjust without breaking its own system. That’s the lens you end up using when you look at Walrus closely.
And once you do, one thing becomes clear: the project isn’t riding hype—it’s quietly built around controlled strengths, solid foundations, and early risk hedging.
Starting Due Diligence the Right Way: Ignore the Shine You don’t begin with narratives. You begin with friction.
Walrus reports strong surface metrics—millions of accounts, millions of blobs, nearly 30TB stored. At first glance, it looks explosive. But when you trace the flow, you notice something important.
About 85% of users come from the Sui ecosystem. Only a small slice comes from outside. That tells you Walrus isn’t yet a free-roaming giant. It’s anchored.
But then you hit the second layer.
Their conversion rate is roughly 35%, almost double what most storage protocols manage. That’s not luck. That’s intent. The team focused early on AI and RWA, used subsidies to remove onboarding pain, and avoided chasing low-value users.
They didn’t just borrow traffic from Sui. They turned it into paying demand.
Then you check the tech claims—because marketing lies don’t survive testing.
RedStuff redundancy stays at 4–5x. AI storage costs drop to about $2,400 per 100GB per year. Recovery averages 36 minutes. Availability holds at 99.98% under stress.
None of this feels inflated. It works because it was designed for real usage, not whitepaper applause.
At this point, the picture sharpens: Walrus isn’t winning attention. It’s winning efficiency.
The Strengths You Can Clearly See
Three advantages stand out once you strip everything else away. They’re not loud, but they reinforce each other in a way that’s hard to copy.
1. Technology that bends to the use case
Walrus didn’t try to be “the best storage” in abstract terms. Instead, it asked a simpler question: what do AI teams and RWA issuers actually need?
AI needs cheap storage, fast recovery, and frequent access. RWA needs stability, compliance, and long-term guarantees.
RedStuff was tuned around those realities. Not benchmarks. That’s why smaller AI teams can afford it, and regulated projects are comfortable trusting it.
Add native Move integration, and developers are live in days, not weeks. That matters more than most people admit.
2. Ecosystem binding that goes both ways
Walrus doesn’t just sit inside Sui. It makes Sui better.
Sui handles execution. Walrus handles storage. AI and RWA projects finally stop hacking together off-chain solutions. In return, Walrus becomes the default—not because it’s forced, but because it fits. Reinvesting capital into the ecosystem only tightens that loop. That’s why close to 80% of Sui projects end up using Walrus without much debate.
This isn’t dependency. It’s shared gravity.
3. Monetization built around outcomes, not disk space
Most storage protocols still charge like cloud providers from 2012.
Walrus doesn’t.
AI users pay for storage, compute coordination, and data services. RWA users pay for audits, compliance, traceability, and long-term guarantees.
That’s why one RWA project can generate six figures in revenue while storage costs remain low. It’s also why revenue is split fairly evenly between AI and RWA—two very different demand profiles, both profitable.
The Cards the Team Isn’t Advertising
This is where things get interesting—and where casual observers usually stop looking.
Quiet card #1: Owning the real core Walrus uses Sui for ordering and gas. Fine. But the heart of the system—RedStuff, recovery logic, compliance verification—is fully owned by the Walrus team.
That separation is intentional. It gives them room to maneuver later if ecosystem dynamics change.
Quiet card #2: Cross-ecosystem prep before it’s needed
Most projects wait until dependency becomes a problem. Walrus didn’t.
Ethereum and BSC integrations are already being tested. Pilot partners exist. A dedicated team is working on lightweight interfaces.
Revenue hasn’t shifted yet—but the door is open.
It earned it by knowing exactly where to focus, where to lean on partners, and where to quietly prepare for problems before they show up.
Short term, it’s well positioned inside Sui. Long term, everything hinges on execution beyond that comfort zone.
If cross-ecosystem traction, node scaling, and scenario expansion land, Walrus becomes real infrastructure. If not, growth slows—and the valuation conversation changes.
Either way, it’s a good reminder of what real due diligence looks like in Web3: watch behavior, not headlines—and always pay attention to what teams are building when no one is looking.
The most powerful signal? Walrus already uses cross-chain strategies, less expensive nodes, and more intelligent token design to mitigate risks. Not flawless, but deliberate. This is how long-term projects endure.#walrus $WAL @Walrus 🦭/acc
I Finally Cracked the Logic Behind Walrus’s “Balanced Execution” Strategy
After watching Web3 projects for years, you start to notice a pattern. Most don’t fail because they lack vision. They fail because they swing too hard in one direction.
Some burn cash to move fast and lose control. Others build walls so thick they miss the moment entirely. What caught my attention about Walrus is that it didn’t choose either extreme.
Despite the headlines—Mysten Labs backing, $140M raised, $2B valuation—the real story sits underneath. Walrus didn’t rush blindly, and it didn’t isolate itself for purity. Instead, it kept choosing the middle ground. Not the safe middle, but the useful one.
Speed, but with brakes. Dependency, but with leverage. Monetization, but with patience.
Once you follow the execution closely, a clear pattern emerges: every decision is a trade, and every trade is hedged.
1. Using the Ecosystem Without Being Swallowed by It
For any Web3 project, cold start is brutal. Ecosystem leverage is often the only realistic option. The danger, of course, is becoming a plug-in instead of a platform.
Walrus leaned hard into Sui early—and that was the right call. They reused Move. Matched Sui’s object model. Let developers ship without learning anything new. Onboarding dropped to about 2.5 days. That alone unlocked adoption faster than most storage projects manage in months.
The results came quickly. 14 million testnet accounts. 5 million blobs processed. Nearly 28TB of active storage.
More than 80% of early business came from inside Sui. And the team didn’t pretend otherwise.
But here’s the part most people miss.
At the same time, Walrus never gave up control of its core.
RedStuff wasn’t outsourced. Storage logic wasn’t dependent. Compliance systems weren’t borrowed. Those stayed fully in-house. That meant Walrus wasn’t just “on Sui”—it was becoming necessary to Sui.
They also quietly built a developer base outside the ecosystem. No announcements. No hype. Just preparation.
That balance—leaning in while keeping an exit door open—is harder than it looks. It also explains why they moved in three months what usually takes six.
The risk is obvious, though. Today, roughly 90% of revenue still comes from Sui. If that ecosystem slows, competition tightens, or sentiment shifts, Walrus feels it immediately. Balancing leverage and independence only works if execution stays sharp.
2. Technical Choices That Favor Reality Over Ego
Instead of chasing extremes, the team asked a simpler question: what’s good enough to work in production?
RedStuff’s two-dimensional encoding isn’t about winning a parameter race. It’s about control. Redundancy stays at 4–5x. Costs drop sharply. Security remains strong. Recovery stays fast where it matters—reads, not writes.
That’s why AI teams adopted it quickly. They don’t care about perfect theory. They care about cost and uptime.
On the architecture side, the same thinking shows up again.
Walrus didn’t build its own consensus. That saved time, money, and complexity. Ordering and payments go through Sui. Core storage and verification stay independent.
Is that perfect? No.
When Sui TPS spikes past 10,000, latency jumps and failure rates climb. That’s the trade. But it also means faster deployment, deeper integration, and real users now—not hypotheticals later. This is what mature execution looks like: accepting local weakness to gain global advantage.
Still, there are limits. Node costs are high. RedStuff is complex. Only 121 nodes exist today, mostly in Europe and North America. Scaling will require simplification, not just incentives.
3. Monetization That Balances Growth and Profit Walrus made another unpopular choice early on: it didn’t try to serve everyone.
Instead, it focused on two scenarios where storage actually matters—AI and RWA.
AI teams care about cost, access speed, and scale. RWA issuers care about compliance, permanence, and trust.
Both pay. Both stick around.
That focus let Walrus avoid head-on competition with Filecoin while building pricing power fast. Today, AI and RWA generate over 90% of revenue. RWA alone accounts for nearly half.
Pricing is where the calculation really shows.
AI gets cheap base storage, higher fees for hot data, and optional value-added services. RWA gets audits, compliance layers, long-term storage, and staking-based priority. One real estate RWA project generated close to $200K, with margins most storage protocols can’t touch. Tokens tie it together. Revenue feeds WAL buybacks. WAL incentives grow the node network. Growth feeds demand.
It’s a clean loop—but not a risk-free one.
Client concentration is real. Most customers are small to mid-sized. Large enterprises are still rare. That caps upside unless the next phase lands.
4. Hedging Risks Before They Become Emergencies
The strongest signal of operator maturity is what gets built before it’s needed. Walrus is already hedging.
Cross-ecosystem interfaces for Ethereum and BSC are in progress. Nothing flashy. Just steady work. The goal is clear: reduce Sui exposure over time, not overnight.
Node costs are coming down through a lightweight client. Regional incentives are designed to rebalance geography. Again, not instant—but intentional.
Token risk is managed too. Longer lockups. Slower unlocks. Gas subsidies. Revenue-linked incentives. None of this eliminates volatility, but it dampens shock.
Execution here won’t be easy. Cross-chain work rarely is. Lowering node barriers risks quality drift. Token tweaks always upset someone.
But ignoring these risks would be far worse.
What “Balanced Execution” Really Means
Looking back at Walrus as a whole, the pattern is obvious.
They accept ecosystem dependence to move faster—but protect core tech. They give up theoretical purity for real users. They focus on profit early—but don’t squeeze growth dry. They hedge risks before they turn urgent.
That’s the real lesson here.
Web3 success isn’t about being the best at one thing. It’s about staying upright while everything else shifts. Walrus understands that.
If it keeps managing these balances—especially as it expands beyond Sui—it has a real shot at becoming infrastructure, not just another strong project.
If it slips, the margin for error will shrink fast.
But for now, this is what disciplined execution looks like.
How the Walrus Team Is Quietly Rewriting the Rules of Web3 Storage
For years, Web3 storage has been stuck in a frustrating tradeoff. You either paid a lot for security and permanence, or you accepted lower costs at the expense of flexibility and performance. Projects like Filecoin and Arweave mastered their own lanes, but neither managed to escape the triangle of security, cost, and programmability.
Walrus enters this picture with a very different mindset. Backed by Mysten Labs and supported by a $140M private round at a $2B valuation, Walrus isn’t trying to optimize what already exists. It’s trying to change how we think about decentralized storage altogether. Not as a passive data warehouse, but as active, programmable infrastructure, deeply integrated with the Sui ecosystem. This is not a surface-level upgrade. It’s a structural shift—across technology, ecosystem design, and business models.
1. Technology: Escaping the Old Tradeoffs Most storage protocols compete along a single axis. More redundancy means more security, but also more cost. Less redundancy lowers costs, but increases risk. Walrus breaks this loop by questioning a long-held assumption: that security must come from massive duplication.
Its RedStuff two-dimensional erasure coding does something smarter. Data is split both horizontally and vertically, with built-in verification at each layer. The result is striking—99.98% availability with only 4–5x redundancy, even if two-thirds of nodes go offline.
That’s not theory. In practice, this brings dramatic cost reductions. Storing 100GB of AI training data drops from roughly $12,000 on Filecoin to about $2,400 on Walrus. Compared to Arweave, the savings are even more extreme. For the first time, decentralized storage becomes cheaper than many centralized cloud options—without giving up security.
But the real breakthrough isn’t cost. It’s programmability. By tightly coupling with Sui, Walrus turns stored data into on-chain objects that can be managed through Move smart contracts. That changes everything. NFT metadata can update in real time. AI datasets can have layered access controls. RWA documents can remain private yet verifiable.
During testnet, Decrypt Media used Walrus to automate revenue sharing for a 4K video library. What used to take days became near-instant. That’s not just storage—it’s infrastructure that participates in value flow.
There are tradeoffs. Walrus relies on Sui for consensus and execution. When Sui traffic spikes, storage latency increases. This dependency limits autonomy, and it’s a real risk the team will need to manage carefully.
2. Ecosystem: From Dependency to Mutual Growth
Most storage projects “integrate” with ecosystems in name only. They plug in, chase traffic, and remain replaceable. Walrus takes a different route—symbiosis.
Sui handles coordination, incentives, and execution. Walrus focuses purely on storage performance and programmability. Each strengthens the other. Sui gains a native solution for AI and RWA data. Walrus avoids the cost and complexity of running its own chain.
This design choice paid off fast. The Walrus testnet reached 14 million accounts, processed 5 million data blobs, and stored nearly 28TB of active data.
Capital was used strategically too. Over a third of funding supports Sui ecosystem builders—subsidizing AI teams, reducing RWA onboarding costs, and driving adoption from the inside out. Today, nearly 80% of Sui ecosystem projects use Walrus.
There’s also an economic loop. Storage usage consumes SUI as gas. At scale, this could meaningfully reduce circulating supply, aligning storage growth with ecosystem value.
Walrus isn’t stopping there. Ethereum and BSC integrations are underway, with a clear goal: reduce reliance on any single ecosystem. That said, Sui still dominates usage and revenue today. Expanding outward will be slower and harder than it looks. 3. Business: Moving Beyond “Pay Per GB”
Most storage protocols monetize one thing: capacity. Walrus monetizes outcomes.
For AI workloads, pricing adapts to how data is actually used. Frequently accessed data costs a bit more. Cold data costs less. Add-ons like data rights management and access control create extra revenue layers. Partnering with compute providers allows Walrus to earn from “storage + compute” bundles instead of storage alone.
For RWA, the model shifts again. Compliance reviews, long-term data guarantees, traceability services, and staking-based priority access turn storage into an end-to-end service. One commercial real estate RWA project alone generated nearly $200K in revenue, with strong margins.
AI and RWA now account for almost all core revenue. That focus brings clarity—and risk. Client concentration remains high, and enterprise adoption is still early.
Token design ties it together. WAL captures value through payments, staking, and governance. A portion of revenue goes directly into buybacks and burns, aligning token value with real business growth. SUI remains the execution layer, keeping friction low for users. 4. What This Means for Web3 Storage
Walrus proves something important: the old tradeoffs aren’t permanent.
Low cost doesn’t have to mean low security. Storage doesn’t have to be passive. Ecosystem integration doesn’t have to mean dependence. And monetization doesn’t have to stop at raw capacity. This is why other projects are starting to move. Filecoin is pushing retrieval upgrades. Arweave is exploring lighter storage options. The bar has been raised.
That said, Walrus isn’t guaranteed success. Ecosystem reliance, scenario concentration, and cross-chain expansion are real challenges. Paradigm builders don’t fail because ideas are weak—they fail when execution falls out of balance.
Final Take
Walrus didn’t win by chasing metrics. It won by changing the frame.
By rethinking storage as programmable infrastructure, embedding itself deeply into an ecosystem, and designing business models around real use cases, it has set a new reference point for the industry.
If the team can maintain balance—between autonomy and integration, focus and expansion—Walrus may become more than a strong project. It could become the blueprint for what decentralized storage looks like in the next phase of Web3.