Honestly, after years of working with decentralized storage, I've tried so many projects that only disappointed me. Some were so slow that I doubted life—taking half a day just to transfer a file; others were more expensive than cloud drives; some had crippled features—only storing, not managing. After several attempts, I gave up and returned to Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, always feeling that this stuff was just hype.

It wasn't until half a year ago that my perspective changed. I happened to come across the Walrus project, initially just to give it a try and store some scattered files. The more I used it, the more addictive it became. Now I've migrated all my important data and even recommended it to friends working on projects. Only then did I truly realize that decentralized storage can be practical and not just hype.

What moved me the most was its Red Stuff encoding technology. The biggest concern with data storage is loss. Previously, projects I used for fault tolerance often required a replication factor of over 10, which made costs ridiculously high. I thought, who can afford that? Small and medium projects can't handle it, let alone scaling.

But Walrus's solution is different. It reduces the replication factor to 4-5 times, bringing costs comparable to centralized cloud drives, while maintaining security. Data is split into primary and secondary shards, stored across various nodes in the network. Even if two-thirds of the nodes fail, the remaining shards can fully restore the original data. This truly solves the contradiction between cost and security.