Recently, there has been discussion in the blockchain community about the Walrus project. I took a look and found it quite interesting. Simply put, Walrus is a decentralized storage network built on Sui. WAL is its native token, used for storage payments, staking, and on-chain governance.

From a technical perspective, Walrus adopts erasure coding, slicing your large files (images, videos, audio, etc.) and dispersing them across nodes worldwide. What are the benefits of this approach? Costs are significantly reduced, censorship resistance is enhanced, and even if a single node goes offline, data integrity remains unaffected — which is crucial in the current AI era.

Comparing it to traditional cloud storage makes it clearer. Centralized servers are prone to single points of failure, data loss, or censorship, whereas Walrus fundamentally solves these issues through decentralization. Especially for developers, it allows direct on-chain storage of blob objects, naturally integrated with Sui’s smart contracts, turning data into programmable assets. This is particularly useful for training AI models and managing enterprise data.

There's also an ingenious design—the WAL token pricing mechanism. When users pay for storage, they use WAL, and the protocol dynamically adjusts to keep the costs relatively stable, preventing actual costs from fluctuating wildly due to token price volatility. This incentivizes node operators while not scaring off actual users, addressing a common challenge faced by many storage projects.