Imagine if the blockchain world is like the human brain, then the storage layer is the memory center. By early 2026, the Web3 ecosystem no longer satisfies itself with simple ledger accounting functions; the market needs infrastructure capable of supporting the entire digital civilization. The Walrus protocol was born out of such demand—resembling a polar walrus: seemingly bulky but precise and powerful, gradually filling the most critical shortcoming in the decentralized world.

Many people, upon first hearing about Walrus, immediately think of Filecoin or Arweave. But this comparison is like equating an NVMe solid-state drive with an old tape recorder. Traditional decentralized storage solutions are stuck in an eternal paradox: the triangle of cost, speed, and redundancy cannot be optimized simultaneously. So, what is Walrus’s technological breakthrough? It employs erasure coding—a "dimensionality reduction" approach.

Instead of simply copying data for backups, it fragments data into countless pieces, like shattering tempered glass, with each piece carrying original information. You only need to gather enough of these fragments to instantly restore the complete data. The brilliance of this mechanism lies in maintaining extremely low redundancy costs while achieving read speeds comparable to centralized cloud services.

During the 2025 wave of full-chain gaming, Walrus’s true capabilities surfaced. While other public chains were still pondering how to store a few high-definition artwork metadata, the Sui ecosystem was already reaping the benefits of this technology.