In recent months, any project dares to label itself as DePIN, as if buying a few hardware boxes and connecting via Bluetooth means a decentralized future has arrived. But after looking around, I found that the vast majority of so-called DePIN projects are essentially still playing the money game, with hardware merely an expensive entry ticket and almost no real utility. The storage segment is particularly hard hit; efficiency is sacrificed for the sake of so-called decentralization, resulting in products that even developers themselves are reluctant to use. So recently, I have shifted my gaze away from those flashy projects and reassessed Walrus. Not because of its glamorous background, but because it is attempting to solve an extremely tedious yet critically important problem: how to store massive amounts of data extremely cheaply in a world full of untrustworthy nodes.
We must admit a reality: after so many years of Web3 development, the cost of data storage is still shockingly high. Storage on Ethereum is so expensive that it can only store a few bytes, and Solana is slightly better but still can't accommodate large files. So everyone is looking for Layer 2 solutions, sidechains, and dedicated DA layers. However, there is a misconception here; people confuse data availability (DA) with long-term storage. Celestia addresses the problem of making data accessible to validators in a short time frame, but it doesn't help you store it for ten years. So if we want to create a completely decentralized YouTube, or a decentralized AI network that requires massive training data, where should the data be stored? Walrus gives a simple and crude answer: utilizing the high concurrency characteristics of the Sui network, combined with a technique called Red Stuff for erasure coding, making storage as cheap as utilities like water and electricity.
I delved into their technical documentation and found that they abandoned the clumsy method of full network replication, which is an extremely smart trade-off. In traditional distributed storage, to ensure data is not lost, multiple complete copies often need to be stored, which wastes a significant amount of storage space. Walrus shreds and encodes data; as long as a small portion of fragments exists in the network, the original data can be restored. This sounds a bit like early RAID technology but applied to untrusted distributed nodes. The direct consequence of this is a dramatic drop in costs. For those of us used to high Gas fees, this reduction in cost is like a dimensionality reduction blow. If Walrus can truly achieve the price range it promises, then many business models that previously couldn't run on-chain, such as on-chain video streaming and high-definition image galleries, suddenly become viable.
However, during the trial period, I also discovered some very real issues. The current Walrus network does not handle extremely fragmented small files as efficiently as expected. This is probably a common problem with all Blob storage systems; they prefer large data throughput. If you intend to use it to store a bunch of configuration files a few KB in size, the experience may not be much better than directly writing it into a smart contract. Moreover, there are currently too few ecological applications. I don't want to see this turn into a ghost chain that only geeks enjoy.
Speaking of competitors, I must mention Filecoin. Filecoin is indeed the elder brother, but its economic model is overly complex, and the staking mechanism makes miners suffer greatly, plus the retrieval market remains a mystery to this day. In comparison, Walrus appears to be lighter. It doesn't have so many historical burdens and doesn't need to design complex lock-up mechanisms to maintain coin prices. It feels more like a pure SaaS service, only the backend consists of countless decentralized nodes. This de-financialization approach, while perhaps not able to create a huge wealth effect to attract opportunists in the short term, is what infrastructure should look like in the long run. Have you ever seen a water plant issuing tokens every day to encourage people to drink water? The standard for good infrastructure is that you don't feel its presence, yet it is always there.
Another point I am optimistic about is its integration with the AI sector. Currently, all AI projects are troubled by issues of data privacy and ownership. When you feed data to OpenAI, that data is no longer yours. If a decentralized data lake can be established through Walrus, allowing data owners to control permissions while letting model trainers access data at low costs, the imaginative space in between is enormous. So far, I haven't seen particularly mature cases, but this is definitely an explosive point for the future. Imagine your health data and social records are encrypted and stored in slices on Walrus, and you can authorize which medical AI to analyze it, and you could even charge for it; this is the data sovereignty that Web3 promises us, rather than the current situation where selling a monkey picture is called a revolution.
Of course, I can't omit my criticisms of Walrus. The current official documentation is written too hardcore, filled with mathematical formulas and algorithm derivations, which can be quite discouraging for application-level developers wanting to get started quickly. Community governance is still in a relatively early chaotic state, and many adjustments to key parameters feel like they're still being decided by the project team. This shadow of centralization is unavoidable in the early stages, but if it continues long-term, it will contradict the original intention. Moreover, I am also worried that the liquidity issues of the Sui ecosystem itself could impact Walrus. After all, it grows on the Sui tree; if Sui cannot maintain strength in competition with Aptos and Solana, Walrus, as a storage layer dependent on it, will find it hard to stand alone.
Overall, I hold a cautiously optimistic attitude towards Walrus. It’s not the kind of project that can make you rich overnight; its value needs to be reflected in real storage usage. In today's restless market, there are not many teams willing to focus on optimizing underlying storage. If you believe in Sui, in the Move language, and that Web3 will eventually host large-scale data applications, then you can't avoid Walrus. It might still be rough around the edges, with bugs and frequent errors, but it is indeed trying to solve the storage bottleneck of blockchain in a way that aligns more with the principles of computer science, rather than some projects that are centralized servers disguised with a blockchain shell to deceive investors. In this industry full of lies, such sincerity based on mathematical principles, even with a bit of geek arrogance, is rare.
