Walrus: On-chain commitments reduce trust, but increase verification and posting overhead.
Walrus tries to make data storage less about “just trust me” and more about verifiable promises. A publisher posts a compact on-chain commitment to a blob (a fingerprint of the data), while the actual bytes live across storage nodes. Those nodes later serve reads and produce proofs that what they return matches the commitment, so users can verify without relying on any single operator. The trade-off is real: extra transactions and proof work add posting overhead, especially when the network is busy.It’s like sealing a package with tamper-evident tape: you spend extra time, but anyone can see if it was opened.
fees pay for writes/reads and proof checks, staking aligns nodes to stay honest, and governance tunes parameters like redundancy and penalties.I’m still unsure how the network holds up under hostile latency and mass retrieval bursts.
