Walrus uses a two-dimensional encoding scheme to guarantee completeness. This design ensures every honest storage node can eventually recover and hold its required data.
By encoding across rows and columns, Walrus achieves strong availability, efficient recovery, and balanced load without relying on full replication.If you’ve traded early stage infrastructure tokens long enough, you know the uncomfortable truth: most “ecosystem growth” announcements are marketing events dressed up as development. A shiny tweet, a medium post, a few screenshots of Discord activity and then silence. Real builders don’t move because of hype. They move because there is a clear problem, a clear budget, and a clear path to shipping something people will actually use.
That’s why Walrus launching an official Request for Proposals (RFP) program matters more than it may look at first glance. It’s not just another grant page. It’s a deliberate attempt to convert attention into production grade execution and for traders and investors, that’s where long-term value comes from.
Walrus is positioned in a specific and increasingly important corner of crypto infrastructure decentralized, programmable storage for large files (“blobs”). Instead of forcing every app to shove images, videos, AI datasets, or heavy metadata directly into expensive onchain storage, Walrus is designed to store large data efficiently while keeping verifiability and availability tightly integrated with the Sui ecosystem. In plain terms it’s trying to make Web3 storage feel less like renting from a cloud provider and more like publishing to a network that doesn’t disappear if one company changes policy.
The Walrus Foundation formally launched its RFP Program on March 28, 2025, framing it as a way to fund projects that “advance and support the Walrus ecosystem” aligned with the mission of unlocking decentralized programmable storage.
So what’s different here?
Traditional grants are often open ended: “Build something cool.” The problem is that open ended funding tends to produce open ended outcomes. Lots of prototypes. Lots of experiments. Very few things that survive long enough to become part of daily user behavior. An RFP program flips this structure. Instead of asking builders to pitch random ideas, the ecosystem publishes specific needs and invites teams to compete on execution. Walrus’ own RFP page is explicit about what it wants to reward teams with technical strength and a realistic development plan, alignment with the RFP goals while still being creative, and active engagement with the ecosystem.
That’s a bigger deal than most people realize.
Because in infrastructure networks, the greatest enemy is not competition it’s the retention problem.
Retention in infrastructure doesn’t mean “users staying subscribed.” It means builders continuing to build after the first experiment. It means developers sticking around after the hackathon ends. It means an ecosystem producing durable applications, integrations, tooling, and standards not just short-term spikes of activity. Many protocols get a wave of attention and then fade into a quiet state where nobody ships anything meaningful for months. That’s not failure in a dramatic way. It’s worse. It’s slow irrelevance.
RFP programs are designed to fight exactly that. They create a repeating rhythm of work: publish needs → fund solutions → measure progress → repeat. The compounding effect of that rhythm can be stronger than token incentives alone, because it creates actual products people depend on.
And this is where the market angle becomes important but it belongs in the middle of the story, not the beginning.
For investors, the price of a token rarely reflects “technology quality” in the short run. It reflects liquidity, narratives, and risk appetite. But over longer timeframes, infrastructure tokens tend to stabilize around one brutal question: is the network being used for something real, at scale, in a way that’s hard to replace?
That “hard to replace” part is everything. Storage is sticky. Once an app stores data in a system that’s reliable, cost-effective, and integrated into its workflow, moving is painful. The switching costs are real. If Walrus succeeds at turning RFP-funded prototypes into real adoption loops tools, developer libraries, storage marketplaces, verification services, AI integrations it builds the kind of ecosystem gravity that speculation alone can’t create.
Walrus is also aligning with a broader trend that serious markets increasingly reward: structured builder funding. The Sui ecosystem itself runs RFP style funding, and Walrus is adopting a similarly targeted approach rather than scattering grants with no clear deliverable. That’s not accidental. It’s a pattern: ecosystems that survive tend to industrialize their growth process. RFP programs are part of that industrialization.
What you should watch next (as a trader or investor) is not the announcement itself. It’s the downstream proof:
Do teams actually apply?
Do accepted proposals ship by their milestones?
Do projects get integrated into real apps?
Do developers stick around and keep improving what they built?
If the answer becomes “yes” repeatedly, it changes how the market should value the ecosystem. It’s the difference between a protocol being an idea and being a platform.
There’s also a human element here that investors sometimes ignore. Builders don’t want to waste years. They want clarity. An RFP is a signal that the ecosystem knows what it needs and is willing to pay for it. If you’ve ever been in a builder’s position staring at five competing ecosystems all screaming “build with us!” you know how rare that clarity is. Most of the time, “ecosystem support” means vibes. Serious builders eventually choose ecosystems with structure.
Walrus is trying to become that kind of ecosystem: one where decentralized storage isn’t a buzzword but a programmable, verifiable utility layer.
Now the call to action is simple and it applies to both builders and investors.
If you’re a builder: read the open RFPs, pick a problem that genuinely matters, and ship something that survives beyond the first demo. Walrus is explicitly prioritizing execution and ecosystem engagement, so treat it like a professional build cycle, not a grant lottery.
If you’re an investor: stop grading this as an “announcement.” Grade it as a pipeline. Track outputs. Follow which projects get funded. Monitor whether Walrus gets real integrations that lock in developers and data over time. That’s how you identify infrastructure winners early not by hype, but by retention.
Because in the end, ecosystems don’t die from lack of attention. They die from lack of builders who stay.
And the RFP program is Walrus publicly admitting it understands that game.
@Walrus 🦭/acc 🦭/acc$WAL #walrus
