A New Decentralized Storage Solution for the Sui Ecosystem: Walrus Analysis

The decentralized storage network Arweave successfully triggered a rebound in the price, ecosystem, and popularity of AR coins by launching the computing layer AO, which can be considered a turnaround. As a general-purpose computing chain, Sui has now launched its own decentralized storage network, Walrus. What kind of waves will this create in the industry?

Project Background

Walrus is the latest product from Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, classified as "protocol, platform", and primarily positioned as a Decentralization storage network. The project name "Walrus" means "walrus", and its official website emphasizes characteristics such as "growing strong like a walrus" and "adapting powerfully like a walrus", highlighting the reliability and availability 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 building applications or products on Sui. Additionally, Walrus will launch a brand new governance token WAL as a utility token, instead of using SUI.

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 faces issues such as high storage overhead and vulnerability to Sybil attacks. The latter, while having higher storage efficiency, faces challenges such as high computational costs and limited decentralization.

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, including managing system participants, storage fees, incentive mechanisms, etc., which often leads to the introduction of custom blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

The Core Innovation of Walrus

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

1. Adopts a new 2D encoding algorithm called RedStuff, specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. This algorithm is based on fountain codes and combines fast operation with high reliability.

2. RedStuff encodes data into primary and secondary slices through a simple XOR operation, greatly improving encoding/decoding speed.

3. The innovative encoding method allows the system to maintain a replication factor of 4-5 times, enabling rapid reconstruction of the original data even if up to two-thirds of the shards are lost.

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 for verifying whether nodes correctly store data, with costs expanding logarithmically with the number of stored files.

6. The economic model is based on staking, combining rewards and penalties, which reduces the cost of proof document storage.

Walrus utilizes Sui as its control layer, allowing it to focus on solving the core issues of Decentralization storage while gaining scalable, programmable, and secure infrastructure support.

Future Outlook

The Walrus project plans to launch an independent token, WAL, for staking, governance, and other functions. Although the specific token distribution plan has not yet been announced, holding SUI may be a way to receive a WAL airdrop.

Currently, Walrus is preparing for the testnet launch, and the mainnet launch date is yet to be determined. Interested developers can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy their own website.

With the launch of Walrus, the Sui ecosystem has taken an important step in the field of Decentralization storage. This innovative solution is expected to bring new technological breakthroughs and application possibilities to the industry, and is worth the continuous attention of industry professionals.