Walrus is designed as long-term infrastructure, not a short-term feature. It focuses on storing and serving large, unstructured data—things blockchains struggle with—while keeping everything verifiable from Sui. When I upload data to Walrus, the file is encoded into fragments and distributed across a decentralized network. The system only needs a portion of those fragments to recover the original, which makes it resilient and cost-efficient.
WAL is central to how this works. I use it to pay for storage upfront, and they’re used to stake behind storage nodes. That stake isn’t just symbolic—it determines responsibility and rewards. Nodes that perform well earn over time, while unreliable behavior risks penalties. This creates pressure to keep data available instead of cutting corners.
In practice, Walrus can be used for app assets, NFT media, websites, archives, or AI datasets—anything large that still needs on-chain reference. Long term, the aim is simple: make data availability boring and predictable, so developers can focus on building applications instead of managing storage systems themselves.
