What actually is innovative in @Walrus 🦭/acc is not a new data format or a smart networking protocol. It is the choice of viewing the availability of data as an economic coordination issue and not an issue of architecture per se.
The majority of the storage systems presuppose that, once the data is replicated multiple times, the issue of availability will be addressed itself. In reality, such an assumption does not hold at the load. The data can be stored in nodes but it is expensive to serve it aggressively, at the appropriate time to numerous parties simultaneously. The architecture is not sufficient to do that. Incentives do.
@Walrus 🦭/acc begins with this unpleasant truth. The resources of bandwidth, retrieval and responsiveness are limited and scarcity must be priced and coordinated. Walrus by making such dynamics explicit transforms the system to a best-effort storage into one capable of supporting execution at scale.
This is what makes the design modest. It does not make any effort to engineer storage networks out of replication or durability. It focuses on matching behavior and actual demand. The difference between theoretical availability and something that can be genuinely relied upon by execution layers as chains put more and more data through their stacks thus becomes that economic framing.
