In the Web3 and AI era, the value of data is self-evident. But to be honest, current storage solutions all have some issues.

On one side are centralized giants like AWS and Google Cloud, which offer no privacy guarantees, are easily subject to censorship, and have outrageously high costs. On the other side are decentralized solutions like Filecoin and Arweave. Although their original intention of distributed storage is commendable, they suffer from high costs, suboptimal efficiency, and bottlenecks in programmability—making large-scale practical application difficult.

In March 2025, the Walrus protocol launched on the mainnet, developed by Mysten Labs, the core team behind Sui, directly competing with traditional methods by using the Red Stuff encoding algorithm (an advanced erasure coding variant). Unlike traditional full-replication schemes, Walrus’s design is smarter—it uses Red Stuff to intelligently shard and encode large files (blobs). Compared to Filecoin, which may require dozens of times more backups, or Arweave’s near-network-wide redundancy, Walrus’s efficiency and cost advantages are clear.

Market performance shows that Walrus is gaining momentum. As of January 2026, its native token $WAL has a market cap stable between $220 million and $230 million, with a circulating supply of about 1.5-1.6 billion tokens, and price fluctuations between $0.14 and $0.15. This reflects the community and market’s recognition of this new solution.

The real attraction lies in programmable Blob storage. This means DeFi applications, games, and AI data processing can directly call storage capabilities without detours, elevating the efficiency of the entire Web3 infrastructure. Although there is still a distance from technical maturity to large-scale commercial use, Walrus has already pointed clearly in a direction: how decentralized storage can be designed to ensure security and decentralization while maintaining cost-effectiveness and performance.