Decentralized storage sounds great, but in practice, there's always a tough challenge—how to enable ordinary people to participate while ensuring the network doesn't break down?

The Walrus Protocol project offers its answer: instead of making all nodes do the same work, why not differentiate based on capabilities?

**Clearly Defined Node Roles**

They divide nodes into several tiers. Storage nodes are the "laborers," responsible for storing data and providing retrieval, staking $WAL as collateral. Validator nodes and gateway nodes are higher-level roles, tasked with aggregating storage proofs, handling user requests, and providing cache acceleration. These roles have stricter hardware and network requirements, higher staking, and naturally, higher rewards.

The obvious benefit is that those with mining rigs can serve as storage nodes, while server clusters can compete as validator nodes—each doing what they’re best at. This increases overall network participation.

**Quality Is the Only Hard Currency**

But role division alone isn't enough. The network acts like a strict evaluator, continuously monitoring each node: uptime stability, retrieval speed, data integrity. Well-performing nodes earn bonus rewards, while offline or lazy nodes have their stakes penalized or confiscated.

This isn't just about "doing work and getting paid," but "doing good work to get paid." No matter how many nodes there are, what matters is how stable and fast the service they provide is.

**Community Decides Parameters**

Interestingly, core parameters like how much to stake, how rewards are distributed, and the storage fee rate are not decided by a single team behind closed doors. Instead, $WAL holders vote via DAO to determine these settings. The advantage is that the network can evolve itself—adjusting parameters with technological progress, market changes, and incentive flexibility—without being stuck by a single decision.

In essence, Walrus aims to build not just another pseudo-decentralized project, but a truly global distributed storage infrastructure where thousands of high-quality nodes participate voluntarily and self-regulate. If this model can truly take off, its competitiveness will be formidable.