On a late night in January 2026, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of proprietary AI model data were re-sharded and encoded across hundreds of storage nodes worldwide—developers couldn’t see the exact locations, competitors couldn’t steal the complete data, and regulators could audit at any time. The entire process cost only a fraction of traditional cloud storage. This is not science fiction, but the operational reality that the Walrus protocol has gradually become over the past year.

Unlike predecessors who often shouted "decentralization forever," Walrus answers a key question with a cold, engineering logic: when data value begins to surpass computing power, how can it be both widely circulated and not monopolized by any single party?

**Why "Copy 100 times" is outdated**

Traditional blockchain approaches are straightforward—copy all data to every validation node. This works for transaction ledgers but becomes disastrous for 4K videos or hundreds of gigabytes of medical imaging data. Filecoin tries to optimize costs with elastic replication factors, and Arweave attracts users with its one-time payment for permanent storage, but they all face the same dilemma: to ensure high availability, you must increase the number of copies, which results in exponential cost escalation.

Walrus takes the completely opposite route. Its innovation focuses on **Red Stuff Erasure Coding**—splitting large files into tiny fragments, tolerating a large number of nodes going offline or acting maliciously with only 4-5 times redundancy, while still guaranteeing data integrity and recoverability. Simply put, storage costs plummet.