In the field of decentralized storage, cost and efficiency have always been the two major pain points restricting commercial adoption. Walrus Protocol's solution is a two-dimensional erasure coding technology called Red Stuff, which fundamentally changes the economics of large file storage.

Traditional distributed storage generally relies on high replication factors to ensure data security—usually requiring 10-20 times redundancy. This means storing 1TB of data actually requires purchasing 10-20TB of storage space, making the cost prohibitively high. Red Stuff's approach is completely different.

It first organizes large files into matrix form, then applies erasure coding to the rows and columns separately. This process generates two sets of fragments, called primary and secondary. Each storage node only needs to store a pair of corresponding fragments, rather than a full copy. What is the result? The overall replication factor can be controlled at 4-5x, directly reducing storage costs by over 80% compared to traditional solutions.

More importantly, recovery performance. When data loss occurs, the system only needs to download a proportional subset of fragments to fully reconstruct the original file. This means recovery time and bandwidth consumption are linearly reduced (even if two-thirds of the fragments are lost, the data can be quickly restored). In contrast, traditional solutions often require retransmitting the entire file.

This approach is especially friendly for blob-type data such as AI training sets, large-scale game assets, and high-definition videos. Not only does it improve economic efficiency, but more importantly, it makes decentralized storage truly competitive with centralized solutions. From a technical perspective, the emergence of Red Stuff solves the long-standing core constraints in this field.