I was in a cafe once, watching two people split a bill. One tapped “send,” the other smiled, and that was it. Simple. Then my brain did the annoying thing it does. I looked around and thought… wait. If this was on a public chain, who can see it? The amount. The time. The wallet. The pattern. And then a second thought hit harder: even if nobody sees the payment, can they still guess what you’re about to do in the market? Like reading your next move before you make it. Two kinds of privacy. Two very different chats. And most people mix them up. Payment privacy is about the transfer itself. Who paid who. How much. When. Like pulling a curtain over the cash register. Market privacy is about intent. Your plan. Your order size. Your entry level. The route you take to get filled. That’s more like hiding the notes in your pocket before you walk into the room. You can have one without the other. A chain can keep payments private but still leak market signals through other trails. Or payments can be open, but market plans can still be kept quiet with good design. People hear “privacy” and think it’s one switch. It’s not. It’s two switches, wired to two different lights. Now, where does Walrus (WAL) fit? Walrus isn’t a “secret money” chain. It’s a storage layer on Sui, built for large files, or “blobs.” Think of a blob as a sealed box of data. A file, a batch, a report, a set of trade notes, anything big. Walrus is good at keeping that box available across many nodes, without needing full copies everywhere. It uses a trick called erasure coding. Simple version: you cut a big file into many pieces, add a few spare pieces, and spread them out. You don’t need every piece back to rebuild the file. It’s like tearing a map into strips, then making a few extra strips, so you can still read the map even if some strips go missing. Walrus focuses on “can you get the data when you need it?” That is not the same as “can people see who paid who?” But Walrus becomes very relevant the moment you talk about market privacy, because market privacy is often a data problem. Not just a token problem. If a trader, a fund, or a shop wants to keep plans private, they need a safe way to store and share the right info with the right people. Not the whole world. Walrus can help there because it’s built for selective sharing. You can encrypt a blob. Encryption just means you lock the data with a key, like a door code. Without the key, the blob is noise. So you can store trade intent, quotes, invoices, risk checks, even “proof” files, and only share the key with a counterparty, a broker, or an auditor. This is where Walrus feels like a “privacy tool,” even though it is not doing private payments by itself. Still, here’s the part people miss, and it matters. Even if the blob is locked, you may still leak side info. Things like when you posted it, how often, how big it is, who keeps pointing to it. That’s not the content, but it’s a shadow around the content. In privacy talks, people call that metadata, meaning “data about the data.” If you upload a new blob every time you place a large order, well… someone watching patterns might guess you’re active. Walrus can help reduce harm by letting teams share big data without dumping it in public feeds, but it can’t magically erase all clues. You still need good habits: timing, batching, and not tying every action to one clear public trail. So my opinion, as someone who has watched “privacy” get sold as one magic word: Walrus is best understood as market privacy plumbing, not payment privacy magic. It helps you keep the plans and proofs private, because plans and proofs are data. It helps teams share those data boxes without public leakage, because storage is its job. But if you want payment privacy, that’s a different stack. You’d look at private transfer tools, shielded pools, or proof-based spend systems. Two talks. Two tool sets. Walrus can be part of a “quiet market” design, where your strategy notes are sealed, shared only with who must see them, and still retrievable when it counts. And that’s huge, honestly, because markets don’t just leak through payments. They leak through documents, logs, and messy data trails. Not Financial Advice.
