Blockchain users face a longstanding dilemma—the conflict between privacy and decentralized storage. Centralized cloud services are expensive and insecure, prone to censorship, and carry single points of failure risks. DeFi projects claim to protect privacy, but in practice, they often waver between transaction transparency and user privacy, without truly solving the problem.

Today, I want to talk about the Walrus protocol, which makes a different attempt in this direction. It is built on the high-performance Sui public chain, aiming to provide users with a blockchain experience that is both secure and private. Don’t think of it as an ordinary DeFi platform; it’s more like a complete decentralized infrastructure—using innovative technical methods to enable privacy-preserving transactions and data storage, while giving users full control over their assets.

First, let’s discuss privacy transactions. The privacy features supported by Walrus are quite impressive—sensitive information like transaction amounts and wallet addresses can be hidden, preventing on-chain scraping and tracking. In an era of increasing regulation, this demand is very real. Whether you’re transferring funds, providing liquidity, or executing complex arbitrage strategies, all can be done without exposing your identity. Crucially, the protocol provides users with a full suite of tools to participate in various dApps, liquidity mining, and yield farming.

Compared to other privacy solutions on different chains, Walrus is more thorough. It doesn’t rely on third-party mixers or stacking zero-knowledge proofs with complex designs; instead, it supports privacy natively. The result is a smoother user experience and lower transaction fees.

Now, let’s look at decentralized storage. Traditional cloud providers hold the keys to your data’s life and death, but Walrus aims to change that. User data is stored on a distributed network, with no centralized entity able to unilaterally freeze or delete your information. This is especially important for DeFi users—your transaction records, holdings, and contract interaction history are fully preserved, but control always remains in your hands.

Together, these two features make Walrus an ecosystem that both protects privacy and preserves autonomy. Users don’t have to choose between security and convenience, nor rely on centralized service providers. Although the technical approach is complex, for users, it boils down to one word—great experience, low cost, and strong privacy.

Of course, balancing privacy and regulation is always a sword hanging over Web3. How Walrus handles this issue, and whether it can truly scale and implement at scale, remains to be seen. But at least in terms of direction, it represents a different way of thinking.