Sui officially launches a new decentralized storage solution, Walrus

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully boosted the price, ecosystem, and popularity of the AR token. The launch of the decentralized storage network Walrus by Sui, a general-purpose computing chain, has also attracted widespread attention in the industry.

Background Introduction

Team

Walrus is the latest decentralized storage network product launched by Mysten Labs. Mysten Labs is the development company behind Sui, with most of its founders and employees coming from Meta('s former Facebook) dissolved blockchain project Diem. The name "Walrus" is derived from "walrus," emphasizing its reliability and adaptability as a storage system.

and the relationship with Sui

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

Competitive Comparison

Decentralization storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and systems using Reed-Solomon(RS) encoding. Fully replicated systems, such as a well-known storage platform and a certain storage network, have the advantage of complete files on storage nodes, but they face issues such as high storage costs and vulnerability to Sybil attacks. RS encoding systems split files into smaller slices, but they have drawbacks such as high computational costs and limited levels of decentralization.

The challenges faced by storage

Existing decentralized storage systems face two main challenges:

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

Core Innovation

Walrus utilizes innovative erasure coding technology to quickly and robustly encode data into small fragments, which are distributed and stored across the network. Even if a large portion of the fragments is lost, the original data can still be quickly reconstructed. The core innovations of Walrus include:

1. RedStuff Algorithm: A new 2D encoding algorithm designed for Byzantine fault tolerance, based on fountain codes, combining fast operations and high reliability.

2. Efficient encoding/decoding: Mainly uses XOR operations, which are faster than RS encoding.

3. Low storage overhead: The system can scale to hundreds of nodes, with high elasticity and fault tolerance.

4. Committee Reconfiguration Protocol: Addressing the natural attrition of storage nodes to ensure continuous data availability.

5. Asynchronous Challenge Protocol: Efficiently verifies whether nodes correctly store data, with costs expanding logarithmically with the number of stored files.

6. Economic Model: Based on staking, combined with reward and punishment mechanisms.

Walrus utilizes Sui as the control layer, focusing on solving the core issues of Decentralization storage, providing a scalable, resilient, and economically viable storage solution.

Future Outlook

Walrus will launch an independent token WAL for staking, governance, and more. A testnet is expected to be launched soon, with the mainnet launch date to be determined. Currently, users can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy their own website.

With the growing demand for decentralized storage, Walrus is expected to occupy an important position in this field thanks to its innovative technology and close integration with Sui. However, its actual performance and market acceptance still need further observation and verification.