An interesting phenomenon: most people think of "cheap storage" when talking about Walrus, but that's actually a misunderstanding.

In my understanding, the most impressive aspect of Walrus isn't about price, but about fundamentally changing the concept of "data trust." There's a big contradiction in the on-chain world—computations on the chain are trustworthy and verifiable, but data is often a black box. Running application logic on-chain is fine, but once it involves off-chain data, images, model parameters, or user-generated content, the entire system starts to leak.

What Walrus aims to do is very different. It wants these data itself to have "verifiable" properties, eliminating the need to rely on a centralized server as the source of truth. Using erasure coding, data should not only "exist" but also be provably "actually existed, never tampered with, and recoverable at any time." This could be a disruptive capability for decentralized social networks, on-chain AI applications, complex games, or metaverse ecosystems.

However, there are many practical hurdles. First is the development barrier—ordinary engineers are unfamiliar with the combination of erasure coding and verifiable data layers, requiring very user-friendly development tools and documentation to truly promote adoption. Second, it's not something aimed at end-users, making it hard to clearly explain "what I can do with it" in a single sentence. The third challenge is that projects truly needing this are often still in very early stages, with few ecosystem applications.

On the token side, it's even more painful. Currently, it mainly serves as a role for network incentives and security binding, not as a "consumer-driven" token. This means its value is more derived from long-term network growth rather than short-term demand. If the ecosystem doesn't take off, all stories about it seem somewhat empty.

My conclusion is—Walrus isn't designed for the current market. It's paving the way for more complex, more native on-chain applications in the future. Once Web3 truly moves toward AI-native, social-native, and content-native, its value is likely to be thoroughly re-evaluated. But until then, it’s destined to be underestimated, misunderstood, and even overlooked by many. This might just be the fate of early infrastructure.