Recently, blockchain storage has become active again. Filecoin is working on the F3 consensus upgrade, Arweave is expanding its ecosystem roadmap, while IPFS hasn't gained much attention. Suddenly, Walrus emerged out of nowhere, and less than a year after its mainnet launch, it has gained support from several top exchanges, with community enthusiasm skyrocketing. I took some time to review its technical approach and found that it indeed has unique features.

Let's start with the underlying coding. Walrus uses RedStuff erasure coding, which is fundamentally different from traditional full-replica storage. It slices files into multiple slivers, encodes them with Reed-Solomon algorithms, and disperses them into shards across various storage nodes. The key point is—only 1/3 of the symbols are needed to fully recover the entire file. What does this mean? Suppose there are 300 storage nodes; even if 200 nodes fail or act maliciously, your data can still be fully retrieved.

Looking at Filecoin's Proof of Replication (PoRep) scheme, it also guarantees data integrity, but fundamentally it still requires storage providers to keep a complete copy. It uses cryptographic verification to ensure you're actually storing the data, preventing forgery, but the redundancy overhead is significant—storing 1TB of data might require several TBs of physical storage on the network. Walrus only needs five times redundancy to achieve the same security level, which clearly offers better efficiency.