After spending a long time in the crypto world, you gradually start to feel which projects rely on narrative bonuses and which ones truly have substance. Some seemingly lively and popular products are, to be honest, just passing by on the coattails of a certain trend—once the hype fades, they are cast aside and forgotten.

Walrus gives me a completely different impression. What is the core trait of this project? I’ve never thought of it as a cash grab. It doesn’t rely on marketing-driven hype tactics, nor does it use KOL shoutouts. Instead, all its energy is focused on product design.

From a functional perspective, it is a decentralized storage solution for the Sui ecosystem, targeting the storage needs of massive files like AI models and on-chain data. Its technical approach uses erasure coding to drastically reduce storage costs to about 20% of Filecoin’s, comparable to centralized cloud service prices—that’s real strength.

More importantly, this technical design gives the entire system internal consistency. Data reliability doesn’t depend on market hype or extra incentives to maintain availability. Whether institutional attention is high or low, whether user numbers are many or few, it operates steadily according to its own logic, unaffected by external shifts in attention.

I’ve interacted with many developers using Walrus, and there’s an interesting detail—rarely do they discuss when to exit, what to do if user numbers decline, or whether to switch to a new track. What’s the default assumption among these developers? That this thing should always be there, like a programmer’s attitude toward code—just infrastructure. This shift isn’t driven by marketing hype; it’s earned through the product’s stability and foresight.