In the field of decentralized storage, an old problem has long troubled practitioners: how to ensure data security without being dragged down by crazy storage costs.

Systems like Filecoin, which rely on full replication, require 25 times the storage overhead to achieve a sufficient security level—that is, paying 25 times the cost to store a single copy of data. The later-developed Reed-Solomon coding scheme cleverly reduces replication costs but introduces a new problem: when nodes fail and data needs to be recovered, bandwidth consumption grows linearly with the size of data blocks, making recovery highly inefficient.

MystenLabs' Walrus network proposes a different approach. Their developed Red Stuff 2D erasure coding protocol's core selling point is finding a balance—achieving the security standards of traditional full replication systems (10⁻¹² level) with only a 4.5x replication factor, directly reducing storage costs to one-fifth. Even more impressive, the recovery mechanism is optimized so that bandwidth costs are compressed from O(|blob|) to O(|blob|/n), making fault recovery much more efficient.

Another innovation addresses asynchronous network environments. Walrus is the first protocol to support storage challenges in asynchronous networks. Through a dual-dimensional coding threshold design, it effectively prevents malicious nodes from exploiting network delays to evade storage verification, closing a long-standing security loophole.

Regarding node mobility, Walrus has designed a multi-stage epoch switching mechanism to ensure that read/write services are uninterrupted during storage node committee replacements, elegantly solving the churn problem. The system uses the Sui blockchain as the control layer, employing Move smart contracts to handle metadata, node governance, and incentive distribution, ensuring decentralization while enhancing system manageability.