Since @Walrus 🦭/acc went live on mainnet in March 2025, it has technically been “in production,” but adoption always matters more than dates. The recent decision by Team Liquid to migrate its entire esports archive to the Walrus mainnet is a more meaningful signal of real adoption. This instance includes match footage, clips, and fan content that actually gets accessed and reused, not test data. Moving material like this onto mainnet shows growing confidence that the network can handle real workloads, not just proofs of concept.
One thing that really bothered me was that last month I tried to upload a big video dataset to IPFS for a side project and had to deal with multi-hour delays and repeated node failures. It was truly a challenging experience.
It is like going from renting a bunch of hard drives to renting space in a well-managed warehouse network that automatically handles redundancy.
How it works (in simple terms): #Walrus uses erasure coding to spread large blobs across many independent storage nodes, putting availability and self-healing first without the need for centralized coordinators. It helps keep costs predictable by collecting upfront payments in fiat and spreading them evenly across fixed epochs over time. This forces efficiency under load instead of making promises of endless scaling.
The role of the token is to pay for storage up front (which is spread out over time to nodes and stakers), stake for node operation and network security, and vote on governance parameters.
This acts like infrastructure because it focuses on boring but important things like predictable costs, verifiable integrity, and node incentives instead of flashy features. The Team Liquid move shows that more people trust being able to handle petabyte-class media reliably.
