If one hard drive fails, does the whole network suffer? Walrus uses a "secondary first, primary later" approach to drastically reduce repair costs.
Previously, Azu had set up a NAS at home, and the most painful part wasn't the cost of buying hard drives, but rather that when one drive had an issue, the RAID reconstruction would monopolize the home network speed and CPU for an entire night—only a small issue, yet the system needed to move everything. This awkward situation of "repairing a little, moving everything" is actually being replayed in many decentralized storage systems: when nodes go offline or are replaced, to fix a small piece of data, the entire blob has to be moved at O(|B|), and with high churn, all the "costs saved" are burned in the repair process. Walrus thinks completely differently; it breaks self-healing into a two-stage process.
The first stage is "secondary first": using f+1 nodes holding a secondary sliver to align the secondary dimension first; the second stage is "primary later": then using 2f+1 nodes' primary sliver to fill in the primary dimension. Recovery is about "filling gaps" at the symbolic level, rather than having the entire blob suffer, which is where the real value of Red Stuff 2D encoding comes into play— the thresholds for reading, writing, and self-healing are accurately tied to f+1 / 2f+1.
Simply put: the larger the network, the less bandwidth a single node has to expend for repairs, and self-healing is no longer a series of "catastrophic rebuilds" but rather a routine backend operation; the white paper outlines this as a key improvement for high churn open networks—maintaining a low replication factor while efficiently recovering in cases of node mobility.
It is precisely because the underlying system dares to handle repairs at such a detailed level that WalrusProtocol was able to attract 887 developers and 282 projects at the Haulout mainnet hackathon, stacking real demands like AI, data markets, and privacy applications—no one wants to entrust large files to a system that can cause the entire network to "freeze like a PPT" with just one repair. In my view, this "secondary first, primary later, filling holes symbolically" self-healing philosophy speaks more than any TPS and bandwidth gimmick: this storage system is prepared for the long haul.
