When I first started in the industry, I felt that data was something far removed from ordinary people. Daily browsing history, photos taken, ride routes, food delivery orders—it's as if they were born to be stored on the servers of tech giants. They analyze and monetize it, and what about us? Besides using free apps, we don’t get anything out of it.

But in recent years, I’ve discovered a fundamental problem. Data is clearly generated by us, but control and revenue rights have nothing to do with us. It’s like growing your own vegetables, but someone else takes them to market and sells them—nothing goes into your pocket, and you don’t even know where your vegetables ended up. The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel.

Until I noticed Walrus, a project planning to launch its mainnet in March 2025. What attracts me most isn’t the flashy technology, but its goal to solve this core contradiction. The logic is straightforward: your data, you decide. Who can see it, who can use it—you control it. If your data has value, then the profits should flow back to you.

At first, I thought this was just an idealistic storage tool. But after seeing several real-world application cases in 2025, I believe this has real potential.

For example, health data applications like CUDIS allow you to have full control over sensitive information such as your medical reports and exercise records. You can keep it yourself or authorize research institutions or pharmaceutical companies to use it. But here’s a key shift: they have to pay you for using your data, and that money is directly transferred to your account. It’s no longer one-way data exploitation but a paid information collaboration.

This idea of combining distributed storage with data rights confirmation might truly be changing the entire game.