Recently, I delved into the Walrus protocol, and the more I explored, the more I realized this project has potential. It seems it could become one of the most critical infrastructures for the integration of AI and Web3.

The reality is this: AI development is rapid, but data remains a bottleneck. Centralized cloud services are comfortable to use but come with significant costs—expensive fees, susceptibility to censorship, and privacy concerns. If a company goes bankrupt or the service is interrupted, your data could be lost. Previously, decentralized storage solutions in Web3 (like Filecoin and Arweave) addressed decentralization but had obvious issues: extremely high costs, slow speeds, poor support for large files. Most importantly, AI requires frequent read/write operations and dynamic data updates, which these solutions simply can't handle.

Walrus directly addresses these pain points. Developed by the Sui team at Mysten Labs, it is a decentralized storage and data availability protocol. Its core technologies include:

First, an upgraded version of the Red Stuff encoding technology, which maintains fault tolerance while reducing storage overhead to only 3~4 times. Compared to traditional blockchain replication schemes that require 25~100 times, the cost difference is orders of magnitude. Second, it leverages Sui as the metadata and verification layer, dispersing storage nodes across hundreds or thousands of independent nodes. This not only utilizes Sui’s high performance and low latency but also achieves true decentralization. Another highlight is native support for programmable data—data is no longer static files; developers can directly build application logic on the data layer.