Walrus and Sui ecosystem's leading DeFi project Aftermath Finance's collaboration looks like good news for a win-win ecosystem, but a closer look reveals a long-standing problem that has troubled infrastructure projects—called "protocol wear."

Aftermath plans to use Walrus to archive its transaction history and liquidity pool snapshots, which will significantly speed up frontend queries and reduce pressure on Sui full nodes. Sounds good. But there is a hidden risk: as a high-frequency trading protocol, Aftermath generates a huge amount of data daily and has extremely high requirements for real-time archiving. This essentially forces the Walrus network to perform customized optimizations—speeding up proof generation, increasing data throughput, and fine-tuning various details.

This kind of service skewed toward a single "big client" usually results in two outcomes:

First, network resources are squeezed by the highest-priority demands of "big clients." The experience and fairness of smaller projects are thus compromised.

Second, the protocol's technological evolution is "hijacked." Development teams keep patching and improving for these key clients, but the core roadmap is gradually eroded, deviating from more universal and long-term design principles.

Such incidents are all too common in history. Walrus needs to think carefully: how to balance capturing the benefits of ecosystem integration with maintaining its neutrality and robustness. Otherwise, something originally meant to be a decentralized public good could slowly become a private outsourcing service for a few large applications.