The relationship between crypto projects and user communities is often a prolonged tug-of-war—one side shouting for decentralization, while the other is actually fighting over who holds more influence.

When the news of Tusky's planned shutdown was announced, many users were caught off guard. The original migration deadline on January 19 was too tight; data transfer, verification, and the entire process of moving to a new publisher—all these steps, if any one of them failed, could result in losing important content. The anxiety was palpable.

A key tweet on January 13 turned the situation around. Walrus Protocol directly announced: the migration window has been extended to a full 90 days, pushed back to March 19. This is not just a simple delay notice—it’s actually answering a fundamental question: what does decentralization really mean?

Many people think decentralization is just about technical stacking—distributed storage, erasure coding slices, etc.—as long as the data remains alive forever. But Walrus’s approach is different. As a foundational storage protocol, its technology indeed guarantees the persistence of data across global nodes—if the frontend goes down or the service stops, the blob files still safely survive on the network. But the team didn’t stop there; they went on to coordinate with Tusky and managed to secure an additional 60 days of buffer time.

What does this mean? Users have ample time to calmly choose alternative solutions, such as switching to ZarkLab, nami, or other publishers, without rushing into decisions. The migration guide is also very detailed, walking you through each step with visuals to smoothly transfer data from the Sui ecosystem.

True decentralization is really about combining solid technical safeguards with listening to users’ genuine pain points and acting quickly. Walrus’s move here is a good example of that.