To say that this year's hot topic in the decentralized storage sector is Walrus Protocol, which gained widespread attention with a technical concept—"permanent storage." This slogan sounds grand, but they do have real capabilities to back it up. The core weapon is RedStuff, a two-dimensional erasure coding technology. Today, let's delve into how this thing is actually implemented and why it can become a killer feature for storage networks.

First, the conclusion: RedStuff strikes an excellent balance between storage costs and data reliability.

Currently, storage solutions are diverse. Some projects rely on simple brute-force copying strategies—storing 10 copies of a file across different nodes to prevent data loss. Cost? Directly multiplied by 10, which users can't afford. Other projects adopt RS coding (Reed-Solomon coding), which is an improvement, but Walrus's RedStuff is like a dimensionality reduction attack on storage technology.

The principle isn't complicated, but it's clever. It organizes a data block into a two-dimensional matrix structure, then encodes both horizontally and vertically. It sounds simple, but the effect is transformative.

**Why is this approach so powerful?**

Fault tolerance is explosive. In this 2D matrix, even if multiple data blocks are lost or damaged simultaneously at different positions, the system can still fully recover the original data from encoding information in other dimensions. One-dimensional encoding can't do this.

Redundancy efficiency is astonishingly high. According to official data, Walrus only needs about 4-5 times effective redundancy to meet the reliability standards of "permanent storage." In comparison, other networks often require 8x, 10x, or even higher. Don't underestimate a few times difference—in an industry that emphasizes economies of scale, even a slight reduction in redundancy ratio results in exponential cost advantages.

**What real-world benefits does this translate into?**

For storage users, the unit cost drops directly. The overall network operation becomes more efficient, and storage fees naturally decrease—that's hard logic.

For participating node operators, opportunities increase. With the same hard drive capacity, lower redundancy means more actual data can be stored, and the token rewards for mining naturally rise.

For the entire Web3 ecosystem, the economic model becomes viable. Big storage consumers like AI datasets and 4K streaming media finally have a feasible on-chain storage solution, no longer just a theoretical concept.

In essence, RedStuff finds the optimal solution in the storage triangle (cost, reliability, efficiency). This isn't just marketing jargon but solid mathematics and engineering design. Compared to other storage networks today, Walrus's technical choices are truly unique. For decentralized storage to truly become practical, it must be cost-competitive, and RedStuff is the key breakthrough.