Walrus Protocol is based on the thinking of a storage engineer as opposed to a financial one. It does not aim to do better swaps or less expensive gas, but a more fundamental tradeoff: the ability of decentralized systems to support large persistent data volumes without collapsing their weight.
The protocol is a special data availability layer. Applications send big data blobs which are committed on-chain cryptographically, the data is erasure-coded and replicated on a decentralized network of storage nodes. Validators do not store the data, they only ensure that it is available. This difference is nuanced, although it is basic. It enables blockchains to be scaled in terms of execution without the increasing cost of storage.
What is technically interesting about Walrus is that it aligns incentives and mathematics. The availability is provided based on proofs and financial fines rather than on trust in one provider. With a local quorum of nodes, data may be recovered, even in case there is a partial network crash.
Walrus Protocol is not going to supplant blockchains. It quietly extends them. Since rollups, gaming engines, and AI-native dApps increase the data requirements that are too large to be served by L1s, Walrus is poised to be the invisible infrastructure that allows decentralized systems to scale up without failure.
