The Sui ecosystem introduces the innovative storage solution Walrus, creating an efficient Decentralization storage network.

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully achieved a return of ecology and popularity. As a general-purpose computing chain, Sui has also launched its own decentralized storage network Walrus. What new changes will this bring to the industry?

Project Background

Walrus is the latest product from Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, positioned as a Decentralization storage network. The project is built on Sui, utilizing Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata. Notably, using Walrus does not require building applications on Sui, and Walrus will launch an independent governance token, WAL.

Industry Status and Challenges

Currently, decentralized storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and systems that use Reed-Solomon coding. The former includes Filecoin and Arweave, which have the advantage of having complete files on storage nodes, but suffer from issues such as high storage costs and vulnerability to Sybil attacks. The latter, while offering higher storage efficiency, incurs high encoding and decoding costs, and has complex node replacement.

In addition, existing decentralized storage systems face two common challenges: the need for continuous challenge mechanisms to ensure data integrity and the coordination issues between storage nodes. These factors limit the scalability of the system and increase complexity.

Core Innovations of Walrus

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

1. RedStuff Encoding Algorithm: This is a brand new 2D encoding algorithm specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. It encodes data into primary and secondary slices through simple XOR operations, achieving high reliability and fast operations while maintaining a low replication factor of (4-5 times ).

2. Efficient Committee Reconfiguration Protocol: Through this protocol, Walrus is able to cope with the natural attrition of storage nodes, ensuring data availability. The 2D encoding of RedStuff makes state migration more efficient.

3. Asynchronous Challenge Protocol: This protocol allows for efficient proof of storage, ensures data availability, and costs scale logarithmically with the number of storage files.

4. Innovative Economic Model: A staking-based economic model, combined with reward and punishment mechanisms, provides a sustainable incentive structure.

These innovations enable Walrus to provide a scalable, resilient, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution. Sui, as the control layer, also provides a solid foundation for Walrus, allowing it to focus on core storage issues.

Future Outlook

The Walrus project plans to launch an independent WAL token for functions such as staking and governance. The testnet is about to be launched, and the mainnet launch date is still to be determined. Interested developers can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy their own websites.

With the development of Walrus, it has the potential to bring new breakthroughs to the field of Decentralization storage, providing users with more efficient and reliable storage solutions. This will not only promote the development of the Sui ecosystem but may also have a profound impact on the entire blockchain industry.