What Red Stuff Is a Real Technical Breakthrough
The most significant engineering invention of Walrus is not a slogan, but Red Stuff encoding protocol. In traditional applications of decentralized storage, fully copied files are stored, and this is wasteful or simple one-dimensional erasure codes that are expensive and slow to recover fragments in real network churn are used. Red Stuff does not by encoding a two-dimensional slice of a blob, with primary and secondary slivers, spread over a large number of nodes; this requires recovery at bandwidth directly proportional to the data actually lost, but no longer the entire file. It implies that not only can the network manage the loss of nodes and outages, it can do so at a relatively small replication factor of approximately 4.5x as opposed to the naive methods which require a replication factor of 10x or higher. It also assists storage issues in asynchronous systems to avoid the use of network delays by attackers to falsify storage evidence. That is no hype- that represents structural enhancement which research into real distributed systems has found to address a real bottleneck with decentralized storage.
