In the past few days, I've been staring at the screen watching the K-line of the storage sector, making my eyes sore. So I turned off the trading software and went to browse Github, wanting to see how far decentralized storage, which has been so hyped recently, has really been implemented. To be honest, over the past three years, I've had a love-hate relationship with this track. The complicated proof mechanism of Filecoin has really troubled the miners, and the speed of data retrieval is slow enough to make one question life. Arweave, although focusing on permanent storage, has a cost model that works for storing small images, but when it comes to pushing a few GB of video materials, the wallet simply can't handle it. Recently, I saw Walrus popping up in the Sui ecosystem, and at first, I thought it was just another rebranded product from some institution. However, after patiently reading the white paper and testing it on the testnet, I found the logic of this thing interesting. It seems to really grasp the most painful point of current Web3 storage, which is the efficient transmission and cost control of large files.
Current decentralized storage has a common flaw of complicating simple problems. In pursuit of extreme decentralization, it sacrifices too much usability. I tried to use Walrus to transfer a development environment package of several hundred megabytes, and the most intuitive feeling was that it doesn't require the lengthy addressing process like IPFS does. This is thanks to its underlying erasure coding design, which isn't exactly a new technology; traditional cloud computing giants have been using it for ages. However, in blockchain storage, few can integrate this smoothly with verification nodes. It doesn't require all nodes in the network to store a complete copy of the data; as long as there are enough fragments, it can be restored, directly reducing storage redundancy. Compared to Filecoin's cumbersome method of sealing sectors for dozens of days, Walrus's lightweight processing method clearly better meets the needs of modern Web3 applications. Current DApps, whether in gaming or SocialFi, have exponentially increasing data interaction frequencies; no one wants to wait half an hour to retrieve a high-definition NFT image.
I found an interesting phenomenon during my testing: Walrus performs even better than some centralized services when handling unstructured data. This brings us to its deep integration with Sui. The Sui public chain is designed for high concurrency, and Walrus utilizes Sui as a coordination layer to manage metadata and payment logic, meaning that storage nodes only need to focus on storing data without dealing with messy consensus logic. This decoupling is done very intelligently. Among competitors, Arweave binds data and consensus together, which makes the chain extremely bloated; synchronizing blocks feels like downloading half of the internet. In contrast, Walrus's architecture is actually a simplification. I checked the official browser, and while the current node distribution is still not sufficiently decentralized and mainly concentrated in several large data centers, considering that it is still in the early stages, this is acceptable. However, if we want to truly resist censorship in the future, the barriers to entry for nodes and their geographic distribution will need further refinement.
But to be honest, the current experience is full of pain points. That CLI tool is written in a way that is simply inhumane, the parameter configuration is extremely obscure, and the error messages often leave people scratching their heads. I spent a long time unable to connect to the node, only to find out that it was an issue with port mapping, which wasn't mentioned at all in the documentation. This kind of roughness in engineering details is too common in Crypto projects, as if everyone thinks that as long as the narrative is grand, it doesn't matter how the user experience is. Moreover, while the current incentive model looks reasonable, its performance in extreme network conditions remains to be verified. If we really encounter large-scale node outages, can the data recovery speed be as fast as claimed in the white paper? I have my doubts. After all, running data in a lab environment is very different from running it in the complex networks of the real world. I also worry that this heavy reliance on the Sui ecosystem might narrow the path, as Sui is currently gaining momentum, but cross-chain interoperability has always been a big issue. If applications on other chains want to use Walrus for data storage, what are the risks and interaction costs of the cross-chain bridge? I haven't seen any particularly perfect solutions yet.
But that doesn't prevent me from thinking it is one of the most promising infrastructures in the near term. The current storage sector desperately needs a catfish. Although Greenfield is backed by Binance, it still feels like it lacks a bit of decentralization, more like an alliance chain model. Walrus, with its native wild approach, is more likely to stand out. I specifically compared storage costs; although the data from the test network cannot be entirely relied upon, based on its technical architecture, the costs are only a fraction of Arweave's, and significantly lower than Filecoin's real-time retrieval costs. For those projects truly aiming to build large-scale Web3 applications, this cost advantage is a fatal temptation. Just think about it: if you want to create a decentralized Youtube, the bandwidth and storage costs alone could drag the project down. If a solution can reduce costs to AWS levels or even lower, then the business logic can make sense.
In the tech circle, there is often talk about permanent storage, but in reality, most data doesn't need to be stored for ten thousand years. I see Walrus as very pragmatic; it doesn't engage in grand narratives about civilization's tombstones, but rather focuses on solving the current problems of expensive, slow, and difficult data access. The mechanism it introduces of separating storage nodes and verification nodes allows originally idle bandwidth resources to be better utilized. When I was testing, I even tried to run a node on my idle home server. Although I didn't earn much in rewards due to network fluctuations, the entire process felt much more accessible compared to Filecoin, which often requires hardware investments of tens of thousands of dollars. This accessibility could potentially bring about real network effects.
Of course, it's still too early to say who it can disrupt. The moat in the storage sector lies not in technology, but in ecological stickiness. Filecoin has stored so much garbage data that now it is facing tremendous difficulties in transforming into computation. As a newcomer, Walrus's biggest advantage is that it carries no historical baggage. It can directly embrace the latest tech stack without worrying about backward compatibility. The way it handles Blob data is clearly aimed at the data availability market of Ethereum's Layer 2. The current Rollup generates so much data every day that it's too expensive to store on the Ethereum mainnet, and it doesn't last long on the DA layer. If Walrus can secure this ecological niche for long-term historical data storage, the imaginative space will open up.
After these past few days of tinkering, my biggest takeaway is that the iteration speed of infrastructure far exceeds our imagination. While we are still debating whether decentralization is a false proposition, technology has already evolved to achieve decentralization without sacrificing too much efficiency. Walrus might not be the ultimate solution, but it certainly represents a correct direction. Even if its CLI is difficult to use and its documentation is poorly written, as long as it can help developers save money and allow users to retain some control over their data in this increasingly closed internet, it has value. For researchers like us who focus on code and market trends, maintaining sensitivity to this new species is much more important than chasing after those mediocre projects. After all, in this circle, the ones that can truly navigate bull and bear markets are always those technical innovations that solve real pain points.
