Decentralized storage has become increasingly competitive recently, but Walrus has managed to stand out from many projects thanks to the support of the Sui ecosystem, $140 million in top-tier funding, and a set of genuine technological innovations. It has become a potential player to watch in 2026. Being a key project developed by Mysten Labs (the Sui founding team) means that it boasts both strong technical expertise and ecosystem support.

Speaking of Walrus's core competitiveness, it must be its original Red Stuff 2D erasure coding technology—this is a real technological breakthrough. It addresses the three major issues of traditional decentralized storage: insufficient security, low replication efficiency, and high data recovery costs. A comparison makes this clear: Filecoin uses an old-fashioned full replication scheme, while Storj employs 1D RS coding, both with limitations. Walrus's Red Stuff is different; through matrix construction and a dual design of primary and secondary encoding, it disperses data slices across storage nodes, requiring only minimal redundancy to achieve the same data durability as full replication. The most critical aspect is recovery speed—only a single slice's worth of data needs to be downloaded for recovery, reducing bandwidth overhead by more than half.

Even more interesting is its "self-healing" mechanism. When a new node joins or a faulty node recovers, only 1/3 of the secondary slices need to respond to fully reconstruct the data, and only 2/3 of the primary slices are needed for support. This means that even if the network is frequently changing, high data availability can be maintained, and performance levels are directly comparable to centralized cloud storage. Achieving this in a distributed system indicates that the technical design has indeed been carefully crafted.