I’m going to begin with the only thing that really matters in a storage network which is what happens when you try to store something real. Not an idea of a file but a heavy awkward blob like a video archive a dataset a pile of images or a long PDF collection. Walrus calls that kind of unstructured payload a blob and the first surprise is that it does not treat the blob like a cloud drive would and it does not treat it like a blockchain would either. Instead the blob gets transformed before it gets stored. The client encodes it using Red Stuff which Walrus describes as a two dimensional erasure encoding protocol. In plain terms your blob becomes many smaller fragments that are shaped so the network can later rebuild the original even when a large portion of nodes are missing or unstable. The academic Walrus paper is very direct about what this is trying to solve. It says Red Stuff achieves high security with only 4.5x replication factor while also supporting self healing of lost data and doing recovery with bandwidth proportional to the lost data rather than dragging the whole blob around again. It also highlights something that is easy to miss until you have watched real networks fail. Red Stuff is designed to support storage challenges in asynchronous networks so an adversary cannot exploit network delays to look honest without truly storing the data.
Once you accept that the blob becomes fragments you start to see why Walrus leans on Sui instead of trying to be its own chain. Walrus uses Sui as a control plane which means the part that needs global agreement like metadata ownership payments and proofs lives onchain while the heavy bytes live in the storage network. This separation is not just a philosophical choice. The Walrus design paper calls it an integration of a blockchain control plane for metadata and governance with a separate committee of storage nodes that handle the blob contents using Red Stuff encoding and decoding. That choice keeps the chain from becoming a giant replicated hard drive and it gives builders something they can actually compose with smart contracts.
Then we reach the moment that makes Walrus feel solid rather than hopeful. Walrus draws a bright line between before custody and after custody using Proof of Availability on Sui. I like to imagine someone uploading a large file and waiting for the system to say yes in a verifiable way. The Walrus design paper describes the write flow in a way that reads like a checklist you can picture. The user encodes the blob with Red Stuff then acquires storage space through the blockchain then submits the encoded data to Walrus then collects 2f plus 1 acknowledgements from storage nodes and then submits those acknowledgements as proof of availability to the blockchain. That onchain proof becomes the public receipt that the network accepted responsibility for the blob for the agreed duration. The Walrus blog that explains proofs of availability reinforces the same idea and frames PoA as the milestone that anchors availability promises in something anyone can verify.
Now I want to slow down and walk through how this creates value in a real product because storage only matters when someone depends on it. Picture a small team building on Sui with a front end full of media and a community that keeps uploading content. They’re not looking for a lecture about decentralization. They’re looking for fewer late night surprises. So they store their media as blobs and they let their app hold onchain references that point to those blobs. When users load content later they fetch enough fragments from the storage network and reconstruct the blob. The reason this feels calmer is that availability is not a private promise or a hidden operations ticket. The system produces a proof milestone on Sui that can be checked like any other onchain fact. If something goes wrong the conversation shifts from guesswork to verification and that alone changes how teams operate.
A very tangible place to feel this is Walrus Sites. Instead of treating a website as something that must live behind one hosting account Walrus Sites lets you upload a directory of web assets to Walrus and write the relevant metadata to Sui using a site builder flow. When a user visits a site through a portal like wal app the portal resolves a SuiNS name to an object ID then uses the objects dynamic fields to locate the Walrus blob IDs for assets like index html and fetches them. In practice this means a site can be served over ordinary HTTPS while its content roots back to a Sui object and a Walrus storage layer rather than a single cloud bucket.
There is a sweet honesty in how Walrus handles the messy reality of websites which is that they are made of many small files. Walrus Sites introduces quilts which package many small site resources together so uploads can be faster and cheaper. The tradeoff is also stated plainly in the docs. You cannot update a single file inside a quilt. If one asset changes you re upload the quilt. It is the kind of decision that makes sense at the time because it improves the common case immediately while leaving room for future improvements to reduce waste between updates.
Now let’s talk about the token in a way that stays grounded. WAL is described by the project as the payment token for storage and the mechanism is designed to keep storage costs stable in fiat terms. Users pay upfront to store data for a fixed period and the WAL paid is distributed over time to storage nodes and stakers as compensation. This design tries to protect builders from long term token price swings turning storage into a constant budgeting crisis while still aligning incentives for people who keep data available.
If you zoom out you can see the architectural tradeoffs more clearly. Using Sui as the control plane gives strong composability because storage becomes something apps can reason about through onchain objects and events. The tradeoff is dependency. The WAL token white paper states explicitly that Walrus depends on the Sui blockchain as its coordination layer and that disruptions or changes in Sui operations could affect Walrus functionality and usability. Naming that risk early is not weakness. It is the foundation of resilient planning because it pushes teams to think in layers and build graceful failure paths rather than pretend dependencies do not exist.
Progress feels real when you can point to dates and counts rather than vibes. Walrus public testnet went live on October 17 2024 and Mysten Labs wrote that this stage would see 25 independent community operators support the network with more coming online. That is an important kind of milestone because a storage protocol is not truly tested until independent operators run it in the wild.
Mainnet is another anchor. Walrus announced its public mainnet launch on March 27 2025 and stated that the decentralized network employs over 100 independent node operators. It also repeated a resilience claim that even if up to two thirds of network nodes go offline user data would still be available with its storage model. Those are strong words so I treat them as system targets rather than guarantees for every edge case. Still they are clear metrics that show what the protocol is optimizing for.
The WAL token white paper adds another concrete snapshot that helps you feel momentum in operational terms. It states that as of May 2025 the Walrus network had 103 storage node operators with 7.5 million blobs uploaded comprising approximately 630 TB of data. Numbers like these matter because they describe real usage pressure on the system not just a successful launch post.
Market visibility is not the same as utility but it does signal that people are paying attention. Binance shows WAL supply information and notes that WAL is built on the Sui blockchain and is purchasable on Binance. CoinMarketCap also reports a max supply of 5 billion WAL and provides a circulating supply figure that updates over time. I mention Binance here because you asked that if an exchange is referenced it should be only Binance.
Now the privacy story needs a gentle correction because it is easy to over promise. Walrus is primarily a storage and availability layer. It is not private by default. Walrus Docs states plainly that Walrus does not provide native encryption and that by default all blobs stored in Walrus are public and discoverable by everyone. If you need confidentiality you encrypt before uploading. That is why Seal exists and why it keeps showing up in the Walrus ecosystem narrative.
Seal is Mysten Labs approach to making encryption and access control feel like infrastructure rather than a custom project every team must rebuild. Mysten Labs describes Seal as a decentralized secrets management service that combines onchain access policies with offchain services generating decryption keys so content can be encrypted while still being accessible to authorized parties. Seal documentation also emphasizes client side encryption and the idea that encrypted parts can be stored on Walrus or another storage layer while access is controlled through policies on Sui. This is how privacy becomes practical. You do not rely on a single key custodian and you do not treat encryption as an afterthought. You treat it as a first class companion to public storage.
This is also where the human risks show up and why I think facing them early builds long term strength. The first risk is complexity. Two dimensional erasure encoding asynchronous challenge assumptions and epoch changes are not trivial and complexity can hide bugs. The Walrus academic paper calls out authenticated data structures and a multi stage epoch change protocol designed to handle storage node churn while maintaining uninterrupted availability during committee transitions. That is reassuring because it means the hardest parts are being treated as core design concerns rather than emergency patches.
The second risk is expectation risk around privacy. If someone uploads sensitive data assuming decentralization equals privacy they can hurt themselves. Walrus Docs calling out public by default behavior is exactly the kind of early honesty that prevents silent disasters later. The third risk is governance and economics. WAL aligns incentives but incentives evolve and the white paper lists adoption risk reliability risk and cybersecurity risk in plain language. I like seeing that because it signals the project expects reality and is willing to name it.
If It becomes normal for builders to treat large data like an onchain managed asset rather than a fragile link then the value chain gets quietly stronger. A dataset can have a durable reference and a proof of availability. A media library can survive churn without becoming unbearably expensive. A community can host its knowledge without fearing that one account closure erases years of work. We’re seeing the shape of that future already through the way Walrus Sites turns decentralized storage into something you can visit in a browser and through the way Seal makes access control programmable.
And the future that feels most hopeful to me is not loud. It is dependable. It is the moment when a small team can store what matters and sleep without holding their breath. It is a world where a creator can share work with confidence and where a researcher can publish a dataset that stays available and auditable. They’re still building and refining tradeoffs like how to handle many small files and how to keep proofs efficient and how to keep incentives aligned through market cycles. Yet the direction is simple and human. Make data harder to lose. Make availability easier to prove. Make privacy achievable through tools that feel like part of the stack rather than a bolt on.
I tried to use screenshots for the PDF sources as required but the tool returned validation errors in this environment so I relied on the text extracted by the web tool for those PDFs instead. The cited lines still come from the same PDF sources.
I will end softly. Walrus feels like a project that wants to help the internet remember without demanding that everyone become an infrastructure expert first. If it keeps choosing honesty over hype and discipline over shortcuts then it can grow into something that quietly changes lives in the background which is often the best kind of change
