The core contradiction of decentralized storage has always existed—centralized cloud servers are prone to single points of failure and censorship risks, but traditional decentralized storage solutions face the dilemma of high costs and low efficiency. In the era of exploding large files such as AI models, datasets, and 4K videos, this contradiction is especially prominent.

Walrus Protocol's approach is straightforward: use erasure coding technology to intelligently split files into fragments with redundant information, dispersing them across a global network of nodes, while recording metadata on the Sui chain. This ensures both reliability and verifiability, while effectively controlling costs.

The brilliance of this scheme lies in the "Red Stuff" erasure coding fault-tolerance mechanism—if more than 33% of the fragments are online, data can be fully recovered. Compared to traditional decentralized storage methods that rely on full replication, this is a dimensionality reduction attack, directly solving the problem of soaring storage costs.

This year's updates are substantial. The Seal tool gives users true data autonomy: protocol-level encryption ensures data is stored in an encrypted state by default, with decryption keys fully controlled by the user. This tool has handled over 70,000 decryption requests, and more than 20 projects are using it to protect sensitive data. Another tool, Quilt, is specifically optimized for storing massive numbers of small files by bundling them to reduce on-chain transaction costs, making it especially suitable for scenarios with large data volumes but small individual files.

The ecosystem is also expanding: the mainnet nodes have surpassed 100, and the total staked WAL tokens exceed 10 billion. In practical applications, AI data markets can securely store and authorize access, supporting tokenization of datasets; in blockchain gaming, it is used to encrypt and store game states and high-value assets; real-world data has also found its use cases, such as trusted storage of electric vehicle charging data for automatic issuance of carbon credits. Anti-censorship and tamper-proof features, originally belonging to the encrypted world, are gradually penetrating into data management in the physical economy.