Walrus on Sui and the Cost of Proving Custody
On Walrus Protocol on Sui, a decentralized storage blob can become a dispute when a shard goes missing across storage nodes. The cost is proving who held which shard, for how long, using evidence both sides accept. Without a shared custody record, teams stitch timelines from partial node logs.
Custody events can be anchored onchain, forming an audit trail that is public even when content stays private. A receipt can link a blob id, node identity, and time window to a transaction hash, so disputes start from verifiable records and responsibility narrows to the nodes that accepted those shards.
Writing receipts to Sui costs gas and adds overhead to uploads and repairs. Public metadata like timing and node identity can leak usage patterns, and shorter windows reduce ambiguity while increasing churn.
As staking links operator revenue to measured custody and availability, Walrus shifts post-mortems from debate to verification. In a Walrus incident, the first artifact should be the Sui custody trail for the blob, not an email thread.
