Sui ecosystem introduces a new type of Decentralization storage solution Walrus

After the launch of the computing layer AO by the decentralized storage network Arweave, the price, ecosystem, and popularity of AR tokens have successfully risen. Sui, as a general-purpose computing chain, has also launched its own decentralized storage network Walrus, attracting industry attention.

Walrus is the latest product launched by Mysten Labs, the development company behind Sui, and is classified as "protocol, platform." Walrus means "walrus," and its official website emphasizes characteristics of being robust and adaptable like a walrus, highlighting the reliability and availability of this protocol as a storage system.

Although Walrus is built on Sui and utilizes Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata, using Walrus does not require building applications or products on Sui. In addition, Walrus will introduce a new governance token WAL as a utility token.

In the field of Decentralization storage, existing solutions are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and those using Reed-Solomon (RS) encoding. However, these systems face their own challenges, such as large storage overhead and high computational complexity.

To address these challenges, Walrus has proposed innovative solutions. At its core is a new 2D encoding algorithm called RedStuff, specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes, combining the advantages of fast operation and high reliability.

RedStuff encodes data into primary and secondary slices through simple XOR operations and distributes them across storage nodes. This design achieves asynchronous storage proof while keeping the overall replication factor below 5 times. Compared to RS encoding, RedStuff has faster encoding/decoding speeds and offers higher resilience and fault tolerance.

Walrus also introduces an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol and an asynchronous challenge protocol to address the loss of storage nodes and verify the correctness of data storage. Its economic model is based on staking, combined with reward and penalty mechanisms, and the innovative storage certification mechanism allows the cost of proving file storage to scale logarithmically with the number of files.

Walrus's innovations have brought new possibilities for Decentralization storage, providing a scalable, resilient, and cost-effective solution. All of this is thanks to Sui as its control layer, which provides Walrus with a scalable, programmable, and secure infrastructure.

Regarding potential airdrops, Walrus will launch an independent token WAL, which will be used for staking, governance, and other functions. Based on the experience of similar projects, holding SUI may be a way to obtain the WAL airdrop. Walrus is expected to launch a testnet soon, while the mainnet launch date has not yet been determined. Currently, interested developers can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy their own websites.