From 2024 to 2025, the crypto market experienced a frenzy of algorithms and liquidity. Looking back at early 2026, we are standing at a critical turning point — a major migration from cloud-based virtual infrastructure to physical infrastructure.

Imagine high-performance public chains as the neural network of human civilization, and DePIN as the physical framework supporting the entire operation of this civilization. Walrus, on the other hand, is like the core component within this framework that never decays and keeps expanding.

Honestly, by 2025, the market has grown tired of projects that only tell stories on social platforms but fail to deliver real-world results. The true significance of DePIN is that Web3 is shifting from the virtual world to compete for dominance over physical real-world territories. In this competition, storage is no longer just about cloud backups. It has become a key support for decentralized AI models, dynamic NFTs, and global data governance. That’s why Walrus was able to break out in 2026.

From a technical perspective, Walrus accomplished what early projects could not — completely solving the longstanding problem of traditional distributed storage being "only capable of storing but not user-friendly." While Filecoin managed to handle data storage, it always lagged in data retrieval and practical application efficiency. Walrus uses Erasure Coding to slice data into fragments and disperse them across nodes worldwide. In other words, it’s like breaking a priceless piece of art into ten thousand shards and scattering them globally, but you only need to retrieve any small part to fully restore the entire work. This design not only improves storage efficiency but, more importantly, makes real-time data availability a reality.