The Sui ecosystem welcomes a new decentralized storage solution: Walrus

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully triggered the return of AR coin prices, ecosystem, and popularity. As a general-purpose computing chain, Sui's decentralized storage network Walrus will also create a new wave in this field.

Background Introduction

team

Walrus is the latest product launched by a well-known blockchain development company, categorized as "protocol, platform", primarily providing Decentralization storage services. The English meaning of Walrus is "walrus", and its official website uses slogans such as "growing strong like a walrus" and "adaptable like a walrus", aiming to convey the reliability and availability of the protocol as a storage system.

and the relationship with Sui

Walrus is built on Sui and uses Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata. However, using Walrus does not require building applications or products on Sui. In addition, Walrus will launch a brand new governance token, WAL, as a functional token instead of using SUI.

Competitive Product Comparison

Decentralization storage protocols are usually divided into two main categories:

1. Complete replication system: represents certain well-known storage projects. The advantage is that there are complete files on the storage nodes, allowing easy access and migration of files even if some nodes go offline. The disadvantage is that the storage overhead is high, and it may face Sybil attacks.

2. Reed-Solomon (RS) encoding system: splits files into small chunks for storage. The advantage is high storage efficiency, while the disadvantages are high encoding and decoding computational overhead, which limits file size and the number of participating nodes, and the node replacement process is complex.

Challenges faced by storage

Existing decentralized storage systems face two main challenges:

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

Core Innovation

Walrus can quickly and robustly encode data into small shards and distribute storage by adopting innovative erasure coding technology. Even if a large number of shards are lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed. This method results in a replication factor of only 4-5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, while also providing Decentralization and stronger fault tolerance.

The core innovation of Walrus lies in the introduction of RedStuff, a brand new 2D coding algorithm designed specifically for Byzantine fault tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes, combining the advantages of fast operations and high reliability. It encodes data into primary and secondary slices through simple XOR operations, distributed across storage nodes.

The main advantages of RedStuff include:

• The encoding and decoding speed is faster than RS encoding.
• Low storage overhead, scalable to hundreds of nodes
• High elasticity and fault tolerance, capable of data recovery even in Byzantine fault conditions.

Walrus also introduces an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol and an asynchronous challenge protocol, ensuring data availability and the efficiency of storage proofs. Its economic model is based on staking, combining reward and penalty mechanisms, and the innovative storage certification mechanism scales logarithmically with the number of stored files, reducing proof costs.

Potential Airdrop

Walrus will launch an independent token WAL for staking, governance, and other functions. Based on the experience of similar projects, holding SUI may be a way to receive WAL airdrops. Walrus is expected to launch a testnet soon, with the mainnet launch date to be determined. Interested developers can refer to the official documentation to learn how to deploy their own website using Walrus.