By the end of 2025, the announcement that the decentralized social app Tusky would cease operations once sparked attention. Users needed to complete data migration by January 19, 2026—sounds pretty urgent. But this time, something different happened.

The posts, images, and relationship chain data stored on Tusky were not at risk of being lost like in traditional centralized applications shutting down. The reason is simple: the true owner of this data is Walrus—a decentralized storage protocol running on the Sui blockchain. Tusky is just a frontend shell; whether it shuts down or not has no impact on the underlying data.

A user who successfully completed the migration made an analogy: "The library changed the librarian, but the books are still the same, not a single one missing."

This actually reflects three key points behind Walrus's design. First is architecture decoupling—the data storage layer and application interaction layer are completely separated, so the frontend's status won't become a single point of failure. Second is verifiability—based on the Sui blockchain, all stored data states can be publicly verified, allowing users to see what truly happened. Lastly is an open ecosystem—the open-source protocol has attracted multiple alternative frontends rapidly emerging (ZarkLab, nami_hq, etc., are iterating quickly), giving users real choice rather than being tied to a single application.

This case of Tusky actually demonstrates an important point: with sufficiently mature decentralized storage protocols, application-layer competition will become healthy and sustainable. Users no longer need to be forced to remain loyal to a product just to protect their data. This freedom itself is the most fundamental advantage of the Web3 storage paradigm compared to traditional solutions.