Do you have any special features in your home’s kimchi jar? Sealed, sterile, and temperature-controlled—these three conditions are indispensable. What about your digital files? Most are stored in a big cloud service, like putting precious kimchi into a disposable plastic container. If the service provider encounters issues, your data suffers as well.

Recently, I discovered something interesting called the Walrus Protocol. It’s a distributed storage solution developed by Mysten Labs and backed by a16z, with a clever operational logic.

First is the encryption process. Files are encrypted with high strength the moment they are uploaded, as if putting a protective suit on the data. Then comes the core part—data sharding. The encrypted files are split into countless fragments, each stored on thousands of independent nodes worldwide. Imagine not putting kimchi in one jar, but dispersing it across ten thousand jars for synchronized storage. If one jar breaks, the others remain intact.

The most ingenious part is private key management. Each node only holds encrypted fragments; no one can access the complete data. Only you, holding the private key, can gather all fragments from the nodes and restore the original file. This mechanism truly makes the data belong to you.

A recent real-world case confirmed the reliability of this system. On January 19, the access portal named Tusky was shut down. But this had no impact on user data. Everyone simply switched to other portals like ZarkLab or nami_hq to continue access, and the data itself was never moved. This shows that the entire storage network is indeed independent of any single access point.

Currently, leading NFT projects like Pudgy Penguins are already using Walrus to store critical data. If you want to find a truly reliable home for your digital assets, it’s really time to replace that centralized box.