When I first encountered Walrus, I simply categorized it as an independent storage project. At that time, the idea was straightforward: whether to use it or not, just one more option.

But as you delve deeper into the Sui ecosystem, this perception gradually changes.

Walrus's role in Sui is far from being so simple. It’s not just a supplementary functional module, but more like a critical infrastructure embedded at the system's core. It’s just that it hasn't been fully focused on yet.

I observed a significant commonality among projects on Sui—their demand for data far exceeds that of traditional DeFi. This includes not only transaction status data but also game resources, user behavior records, real-time content, AI model files, and other "non-financial data." If all of these rely on centralized storage solutions, it creates an awkward contradiction: the chain itself is decentralized, but the key data is controlled off-chain. Walrus’s actual role is to fill this critical gap.

The turning point that truly changed my perspective came when I realized that Walrus was not an emergency solution added later to Sui, but was planned from the outset alongside Sui’s application architecture. In other words, from the very beginning of its design, it was intended to be frequently invoked by the ecosystem’s applications, rather than just an optional enhancement. This native symbiotic relationship is fundamentally different from the operational logic of many cross-chain storage projects. You can feel that Walrus has already become deeply embedded in the DNA of the Sui ecosystem, serving as a supporting solution rather than an external contractor.