The Sui ecosystem launches the decentralized storage network Walrus, innovative technology may lead to industry transformation.

The decentralized storage network Arweave recently launched its computing layer AO, successfully driving up its token price, ecosystem development, and market attention. As a general-purpose computing chain, Sui has also launched its own decentralized storage network Walrus, and this new move may spark a new wave in the industry.

Project Background

Walrus is the latest product from Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, and is categorized as "protocol, platform", primarily offering Decentralization storage services. The English meaning of Walrus is "walrus", and its official website uses slogans such as "grow strong like a walrus" and "adapt like a walrus", emphasizing the reliability and practicality of the 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 developing applications or products on Sui. Walrus will launch an independent governance token WAL, which will be used as a functional token rather than relying on the SUI token.

Industry Status and Challenges

Currently, decentralized storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and systems using Reed-Solomon (RS) coding. The former, such as Filecoin and Arweave, has the advantage of complete file availability but comes with higher storage overhead and potential risks of Sybil attacks. The latter, while more efficient in storage, faces issues such as significant computational overhead and complex recovery processes when applied on a large scale.

In addition, existing decentralized storage systems face two common challenges:

1. A continuous challenge mechanism is needed to ensure that storage nodes retain data, which limits the scalability of the system.
2. Storage nodes require complex coordination mechanisms, leading many systems to introduce custom blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

Core Innovations of Walrus

In the face of these challenges, Walrus has proposed innovative solutions:

1. Using new erasure coding technology, unstructured data is quickly encoded into small fragments and distributed across the node network. Even if up to two-thirds of the fragments are lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed.

2. Introducing RedStuff, a 2D encoding algorithm specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes, combining fast operations with high reliability.

3. The encoding through a simple XOR operation improves the encoding/decoding speed while maintaining low storage overhead, allowing the system to scale to hundreds of nodes.

4. Introduce an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to address the natural attrition of storage nodes and ensure continuous data availability.

5. Designed an asynchronous challenge protocol that effectively verifies whether nodes are correctly storing data while reducing the cost of storage proofs.

6. Adopt a staking-based economic model, combined with reward and punishment mechanisms, to ensure the economic viability of the system.

Walrus utilizes Sui as its control layer, and this scalable, programmable, and secure infrastructure allows Walrus to focus on solving the core issues of Decentralization storage.

Future Outlook

The Walrus project plans to launch an independent WAL token for functions such as staking and governance. Based on the experience of similar projects, holding SUI may be a way to receive WAL airdrops.

Walrus is expected to launch its 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.

Overall, Walrus, with its innovative RedStuff protocol and deep integration with Sui, is expected to bring breakthrough solutions to the field of Decentralization storage, providing efficient, resilient, and cost-effective storage services.