Recently, I have done in-depth research and practical use of **@walrusprotocol**, and I must say, it may be one of the most underrated decentralized storage projects currently! 🚀
Walrus is a programmable decentralized storage network created by Mysten Labs (the team behind Sui), specifically designed to address the pain points of storing large files (such as videos, images, AI datasets, game assets, NFT media, and even the entire on-chain history) on the blockchain. Traditional on-chain storage is either prohibitively expensive or carries high centralization risks, while Walrus uses advanced **erasure coding** technology to split files into fragments, achieving extremely high availability and loss resistance with only 4-5x redundancy, making it over 10 times cheaper than Filecoin and about 20 times cheaper than Arweave, with costs that are shocking!
Core Highlights:
Data is permanently available: After uploading, it is distributed and stored across hundreds of independent storage nodes, so there's no fear of a single node failure; the protocol automatically repairs itself. Access is through a aggregator + CDN, with speeds close to centralized cloud services.
Fully programmable: The stored blobs exist as Sui objects, and Move smart contracts can directly call, control, and pay for storage, even tokenizing storage capacity to create a market or NFTs!
$WAL token has multiple utilities: paying for storage fees, staking/delegating nodes for rewards, and governance voting. The mainnet was launched in March 2025, and it now supports staking, with incentives for both node operators and delegators. Early community airdrops and subsidies are also very attractive.
Killer feature in the AI era: Walrus is positioning itself as the infrastructure for the 'AI Data Market.' Talus AI agents use it to seamlessly access on-chain data; Itheum tokenizes data; in the future, data will be verifiable and monetizable, allowing creators, researchers, and enterprises to profit from it.
Actual experience: I tried uploading a 4K video of a few hundred MB, paid very little $WAL, and the link opened instantly on social platforms! No more worries about IPFS losing files or AWS getting shut down. It's super stable for game season archives, decentralized websites (Walrus Sites), and NFT metadata.
Looking towards early 2026, the price of $WAL has rebounded from last year's low. Walrus is a key component in the Sui ecosystem's AI infrastructure stack (partnering with Seal for privacy). Sui's TVL and developer growth are ongoing, and Walrus as a storage layer will reap the largest dividends. I personally believe this is the next infrastructure target in Sui with potential for 10x or even higher!
I strongly recommend everyone to visit the official website walrus.xyz to try out the CLI for uploading files and personally experience this wave of 'data revolution.' Hold some $WAL to support the truly grounded Web3 storage! 🐳
What interesting things have you stored using Walrus? Feel free to comment and share, let's boost the Sui ecosystem together!
@walrusprotocol $WAL #walrus
