In-Depth Review: How Walrus Is Enabling Web3 to Overcome Storage Bottlenecks and Enter the Streaming Media Era

Every time we review the development trajectory of Web3, we encounter an awkward phenomenon—Web1.0 was the era of text, Web2.0 has become the short video kingdom, but Web3 remains stuck in the primitive stage of data storage. Aside from token trading and basic DeFi interactions, truly smooth decentralized applications are few and far between. Where does this bottleneck come from? The answer points to two core issues: high on-chain storage costs and insufficient data read efficiency. Want to permanently store a 4K movie on the chain? The cost alone would deter any entrepreneur. Want to train an AI model on the chain? The processing speed would make you question the value of decentralization.

Walrus was precisely created to solve this problem. Developed by Mysten Labs, this project is not just a simple distributed cloud drive but aims to force Web3 out of the inefficient data era and into the multimedia streaming age. Currently, WAL’s transaction price is $0.09, but its true value lies in the underlying technological innovation and ecosystem positioning.

Technological Breakthrough: Storage Innovation with 2D Erasure Codes

Walrus adopts a groundbreaking technology called “Red Stuff” (2D Erasure Coding), representing a qualitative leap in distributed storage. Unlike traditional storage projects that rely on bulky data redundancy backups, Red Stuff instantly slices large data files into countless tiny fragments, dispersing them across a global network of nodes.

This design offers two main advantages. First is extremely high fault tolerance—even if half of the global nodes go offline due to network issues or attacks, the remaining data fragments can still be mathematically reconstructed to restore the original data, with a redundancy mechanism comparable to holographic projection accuracy. Second is a revolutionary reduction in costs—compared to centralized cloud storage services like AWS, Walrus’s slicing storage method reduces large file storage costs to a fraction, making a “decentralized Netflix” viable in a business model.

Ecosystem Layout: Sui and Walrus’s Synergistic Moat

Many people know that Walrus comes from Mysten Labs (the official development team of the Sui blockchain), but may not see the full strategic picture behind it. Sui and Walrus do not operate independently; instead, they form a highly coordinated dual-engine architecture—Sui handles ultra-fast transaction computation and smart contract execution, while Walrus manages massive data storage and retrieval.

This division of labor creates an “ecosystem monopoly-level” moat. In the future, AAA blockchain games and AI agents running on Sui will require and can only store their model files, textures, videos, and audio data on Walrus. This ecosystem binding is not just a technical choice but a strategic depth—forming a strong dependency of Sui users on Walrus’s storage services.

Application Prospects: Trusted Data Infrastructure for the AI Era

Currently, the AI industry faces a fundamental dilemma: training data is monopolized by a few large companies and is easily tampered with or forged, violating the principle that AI should be based on trustworthy data. Walrus is becoming the “trustworthy data layer for AI”—all training data stored on it is guaranteed by mathematical proofs to be complete and unaltered.

This means the economic value of WAL stems from a “rental” model of data storage. Every large-scale data storage and every model training data on-chain creates demand for WAL’s usage. As the AI application ecosystem explodes, this rigid demand will continuously unlock WAL’s potential value.

Re-evaluating Value: Token Credentials for Multimedia Infrastructure

Reflecting on the entire project logic, Walrus’s positioning has gone far beyond a simple storage tool—it is the multimedia infrastructure of the Web3 era. When the next viral application requires storing videos, AI models, or high-definition images, Walrus will become an indispensable hub. The WAL token serves as the access credential and value representation of this infrastructure.

Different perspectives on new things often lead to completely different conclusions. Walrus is not just a distributed hard drive; its strategic value lies in building the data infrastructure for Web3. When true multimedia applications explode, the importance of this track will be redefined.