Over the past few years in Web3, most projects have been doing incremental optimizations in the corners, until Walrus appeared and made me take a more serious look.

To be honest, it didn’t focus on piling up new features or boosting performance parameters. Instead, it hit the industry’s most painful and unspoken sore spot—your data, is it really yours?

Nowadays, the screen is full of decentralization slogans, but upon closer inspection, most projects only pretend at the transaction layer. The core data still honestly resides on centralized servers. As a result, issues like regulatory bottlenecks and data leaks keep recurring year after year, turning decentralization into a joke.

The brilliance of Walrus lies in viewing data and assets as the same level of power, building a truly decentralized storage network. Unlike Filecoin or Arweave, which are either too costly or hard to control, Walrus uses a unique coding scheme to reduce storage costs while enabling data to be programmable and operable. It can even fully on-chain NFT metadata, solving problems many projects have struggled with but haven’t managed to.

The most crucial point—no centralized entity can lock down your data. Whether you are an ordinary user or a developer, you truly have the right to choose. As global data privacy regulations tighten, Walrus opens a new path by breaking the monopoly through a distributed network, bringing the internet back onto a neutral track.

It’s not about attacking anyone; it’s about proving through action that decentralization is not just empty talk. With such a truly implementable project emerging, I remain optimistic about the future development of Web3.