Walrus’s Red Stuff design makes decentralized storage reliable for long-term use and enables self-healing. In real-world networks, nodes often fail, get replaced, or lose data. In traditional encoding systems, this churn causes large amounts of data to be transferred again, making recovery slow and expensive. Red Stuff solves this by ensuring that recovery cost is only proportional to the data actually lost, not the entire system’s data.
In this design, Walrus stores data using 2D encoding, meaning the data is encoded across both rows and columns. Each node receives two slivers: one primary and one secondary. The benefit of this approach is that if a node loses its data, the system can recover it using small pieces from other nodes, without downloading the entire blob. This keeps network load low and makes recovery fast.
Red Stuff also optimizes metadata handling. Instead of every node storing full metadata, it is encoded and distributed, which greatly reduces storage overhead. The read and write protocols are designed so that data is safely stored, easily verified, and reliably recovered—even in asynchronous networks or when some nodes are malicious. This makes Walrus a strong, scalable, and cost-efficient decentralized storage solution for AI, NFTs, datasets, and Web3 applications.
