Decentralized storage has been stuck in a deadlock. To ensure data security, Filecoin needs to replicate data multiple times, with a 25x storage overhead that directly crushes costs; Arweave's one-time payment model makes it impossible to handle dynamic data; although RS coding looks good in theory, its complex polynomial calculations cause bandwidth to explode during data recovery. These solutions seem to be cursed—no matter which one you choose, you have to sacrifice something.

Walrus's approach is different. They don't stick to traditional erasure coding frameworks but fundamentally redesign the encoding logic. The core idea of RedStuff 2D encoding sounds ridiculously simple: replace complex polynomial calculations with basic XOR operations, splitting data into primary and secondary slices stored separately.

What’s the effect? Single-node recovery cost is only O(B/n), and the total network recovery cost is reduced to O(B). Even if two-thirds of data slices fail, the system can quickly reconstruct the information. What does this mean? The replication factor only needs to be 4 to 5 times—less than one-fifth of Filecoin’s overhead, approaching the level of cloud services.

Even more impressive is the reduction in read latency. From seconds down to milliseconds—that’s truly usable. Instant updates for social media, real-time loading for AAA games, smooth streaming of 4K videos—these heavy Web3 applications finally have support. Decentralized storage is no longer just cold data backups but has become a live, hot, readily accessible infrastructure.

But reality still needs to be faced for deployment. RedStuff encoding still faces many issues before large-scale commercial use.