Web3 storage has been stuck in a strange cycle over the past few years. Filecoin trades redundancy for security, Arweave makes permanent storage a small and elegant business, but all these solutions face the same fundamental issue: how to find a balance between storage costs, data availability, and smart programmability? Market products often have to prioritize one aspect at the expense of another.

What is truly lacking is not cheap storage space, but an intermediary layer that can deeply integrate with smart contracts and activate data value. While the industry is still spinning within existing frameworks, Walrus, armed with Mysten Labs' technological expertise and a $140 million war chest, has decided to take a completely different path — not patching the old model, but rewriting it thoroughly from technology, ecosystem, to business.

The most critical breakthrough on the technical level is RedStuff’s 2D erasure coding. This self-developed scheme does not pursue extremes — it neither sacrifices security for lower costs nor inflates costs for absolute security. Its brilliance lies in using matrix encoding to keep redundancy at a "sweet spot" of 4-5 times. This way, it can ensure 99.98% data availability while reducing costs to one-fifth of traditional solutions.

Another detail: by tightly integrating with the Sui Move language, storage state can be directly invoked and manipulated by smart contracts. This transforms storage from a passive infrastructure into an active participant within the ecosystem.