Many people only look at Web3 transaction volume and on-chain asset flows, but the true potential actually lies elsewhere — whether applications and user behaviors can be persistently accumulated into value.

What Walrus Protocol is doing is quite interesting. It’s not just providing a decentralized storage solution, but rather designing a protocol that allows data to gradually form a trusted, reusable ecosystem base through long-term accumulation. In simple terms, it’s building a sustainable data deposition system.

Data speaks for itself. Currently, Walrus has stored over 1.2 PB, connected to more than 350 applications, with approximately 180,000 active users. Although these numbers are not everything, they are enough to show that the ecosystem is steadily growing. The key is not just these figures themselves, but what they represent — an increasingly stable long-term structure.

There’s an interesting phenomenon in the on-chain world: once user behavior and data accumulate, they create irreversible advantages. Imagine an NFT game player storing months of progress and assets on Walrus. How difficult would it be for him to switch to another storage solution? What about the psychological switching cost? This kind of stickiness naturally arises. Over time, every piece of on-chain data written can be called upon and depended on by other applications, making Walrus’s moat increasingly difficult to breach.

The economic model is also catching up. Token reward mechanisms allow developers and users to earn returns from data usage, creating a closed loop both technically and economically. Data deposition and value creation thus drive each other forward.