For a long time, crypto kept saying “everything is onchain”, but in reality most apps quietly depended on Web2 storage. Images, videos, game files, AI data. All of it lived somewhere centralized. Nobody talked about it because there was no good alternative.
That is why Walrus caught my attention.
Not because of the token.
Because of the problem it is trying to solve.
Walrus is built on Sui and focuses on one thing most people ignore until it breaks: large data. Not tiny transactions. Real files. The kind applications actually depend on to function. Instead of storing full copies everywhere, Walrus breaks data into coded pieces so it can still be recovered even if some nodes go offline. It is not flashy, but it is practical.
What feels different is how storage is treated.
On Walrus, data is not just uploaded and forgotten. It has rules. It has ownership. It has lifecycle logic that applications can interact with through smart contracts. Storage becomes part of the product itself, not just a background service running in the shadows.
That is where WAL comes in.
WAL exists to keep the system honest. Storage nodes stake it to participate. Governance decisions flow through it. The idea is simple: if you want reliable storage, operators need skin in the game. Without that, decentralization quickly turns into a marketing word.
The real question is not whether WAL goes up or down.
The real question is whether applications start relying on Walrus for things that actually matter. User content. AI datasets. Game assets. Data that cannot disappear without breaking the entire product.
Crypto is slowly moving from financial experiments to real applications. And real applications always hit the same wall first: data.
Walrus is a bet that solving data availability properly will matter more than most people expect.
Sometimes the most important layers are the quiet ones. Until everyone suddenly needs them.
