After several months of using Walrus, I've been concerned about one issue—the security and privacy protection of this system. The official documentation repeatedly emphasizes technical features like decentralization, verifiable storage, and Byzantine fault tolerance, which sound impressive. However, in actual use, I found some obvious design flaws in privacy protection and system resilience. These issues might not be apparent in the short term, but from a long-term perspective, they pose inherent risks that must be thoroughly discussed.

Let's start with privacy protection. Walrus's default behavior is that all uploaded blobs are completely public; anyone who obtains the blob ID can read the data. Technically, this is correct—Red Stuff encoding itself does not include encryption; it is responsible for redundancy and data recovery, not encryption. But for users, the consequences are serious: sensitive information cannot be uploaded directly; it must be encrypted locally before uploading the ciphertext. This sounds reasonable, but the problem is that this entire encryption process is entirely up to the user—there is no built-in support at the protocol level.

Later, the official introduced Seal to fill this gap. Seal can handle on-chain key management and access control, allowing precise control over who can decrypt what data. The technical solution itself is quite comprehensive, but this tool is an independent third-party component, not part of the Walrus protocol. To use Seal, you need to integrate SDKs, manage key lifecycle, and handle encryption and decryption logic. For developers who are not well-versed in cryptography, the learning and integration costs are significant, and a small mistake could easily lead to vulnerabilities.