Decentralized storage sounds very free, but there is a fatal flaw—data is publicly visible by default across the network.

Most traditional distributed storage protocols use content addressing, retrieving data via CID or hash values. As long as someone controls this identifier, they can freely access the complete content from the network. In other words, your data is essentially exposed. This directly contradicts the original intention of decentralization to protect privacy.

Mysten Labs (the developer of $SUI and $WAL) launched Seal in April 2025—a decentralized secret management service specifically designed to address this issue. It is integrated into the Walrus protocol framework, focusing on encrypted storage of sensitive information from the very beginning.

The core mechanism of Seal is straightforward: your data on-chain is encrypted by default. Only authorized individuals can decrypt and view it. Authorization is highly flexible—it can be bound to a specific wallet address, an NFT, a token holder, or even a wallet domain. Everything is defined by you.

In practical applications, for example, if you want to share a private video with a friend, you can authorize only their wallet address. Or restrict access to users holding a specific NFT, with the ability to set a time window for access. Even more impressively, different levels of NFT holders can unlock different versions of the content with varying clarity.

This is the beauty of Walrus+Seal—the programmable flexibility. It’s not just simple encryption, but a dynamic logical control system that truly balances data privacy and decentralization.