Decentralized storage seems to be a lively track, with Arweave shouting "permanent storage," Filecoin promoting "incentive innovation," and IPFS emphasizing "content addressing," each staking out their own territory. But upon closer inspection, the entire industry still cannot escape some old problems—high costs, poor performance, and scarce application scenarios. In the end, everyone falls into a homogeneous internal competition vortex.

However, Walrus Protocol's approach is quite different. It doesn't compete within the existing framework but instead adopts a completely new idea—using low-cost encoding, a programmable architecture, and ecological collaboration together. This combination not only hits the industry's pain points but also expands the imagination space for decentralized storage. To put it simply, it is rewriting the competitive landscape of the entire track.

Why do I say that? First, look at Walrus's core weapon—the self-developed Red-Stuff 2D erasure coding technology. This thing finds a balance between cost and security, effectively breaking through the efficiency bottleneck of traditional solutions. The comparison makes it clear: IPFS and Arweave use a fully replication mode, making data recovery simple, but at the cost of multiple nodes storing the entire data, leading to an alarmingly high redundancy rate and soaring storage costs. As the network scales larger and larger, the pressure of data transmission and storage grows exponentially.

Meanwhile, Storj and Sia adopt Reed Solomon 1D erasure coding schemes, which can reduce some redundancy, but data recovery still requires fetching data blocks from a bunch of nodes, making recovery costly and inefficient. When nodes frequently join and leave the network, this scheme becomes particularly powerless. In contrast, Walrus's 2D erasure coding design is much more clever, maintaining data security while reducing the redundancy coefficient to an ideal level.