In the crypto market, chasing memes can indeed bring excitement, but the real big money often hides in the infrastructures that change the industry's cost structure.
Today I want to talk about the project that Mysten Labs (the Sui development team) personally developed—Walrus Protocol. In my opinion, it is not only the storage layer of the Sui ecosystem but also a complete 'technical liquidation' of Filecoin in the DePIN track.
1. Technical barriers: Say goodbye to cumbersome proof of replication.
Many people mistakenly believe that Walrus is just 'another IPFS'. That is a huge misconception. The logic of Filecoin is 'proof of replication', which requires redundant storage of multiple copies to store a single file, resulting in extremely high hardware costs and slow retrieval speeds. Walrus's killer feature is a two-dimensional erasure coding technology called 'Red Stuff'. Simply put, it shreds the file into tiny pieces and stores them in a distributed manner. Even if most nodes go offline, as long as a small portion of the slices is recalled, the file can be instantly restored. This means: lower storage costs, faster retrieval speeds, and stronger robustness. This is what commercial-grade applications (such as video streaming, AI datasets) truly need.
2. Core Narrative: The Data Lake of AI x Crypto
The current AI training requires massive amounts of data, which Ethereum cannot accommodate, and Filecoin is too expensive and slow. The emergence of Walrus perfectly fills the ecological niche of 'decentralized storage for AI data.' With the explosion of on-chain games (full-chain games) and SocialFi on Sui, the massive amount of images, audio, and 3D model data ultimately finds its home only in Walrus. As long as the Sui ecosystem is growing, Walrus is a necessity.
3. Investment Logic and Operational Strategy
As a seasoned player, I value the odds. Currently, the valuation logic of Walrus has not been fully digested by the market. Compared to the FDV of Arweave and Filecoin, Walrus still has significant room for appreciation.
Win Rate: 70% (Backed by Mysten Labs technology, almost no Rug risk)
Strategy: Do not just trade in waves. It is recommended to build a position in the secondary market and directly participate in node staking.
Early stakers in storage-type projects often benefit from passive airdrops of ecological applications (such as cloud storage and image hosting projects). This is a golden opportunity to reap multiple rewards.
Walrus is not just a storage coin; it is the core weapon for Sui to challenge Solana's position. In the infrastructure race of 2026, this is a must-have Beta asset.