The storage protocol generates $4,000 per month in revenue, is a $793 million valuation reasonable?

The most straightforward way to evaluate a project is to look at its revenue data. Walrus's protocol fees in the past 30 days are only $4,289, which annualizes to just over $50,000. Compared to a nearly $8 billion FDV, this number indeed seems a bit subtle.

But this is also a common pattern in early-stage infrastructure—valuation is built on imagination, and real revenue needs time to verify. In November last year, Walrus stored 110TB of data; just over two months have passed, and this number has definitely skyrocketed. Storage costs are calculated based on data volume; the more projects connect, the steeper the growth curve.

Let's do a simple calculation. Currently, daily costs are only $37. If the number of connected projects increases tenfold, daily costs would become $370, and annual costs would rise to $135,000. Looking further ahead, demands like AI training and model storage start at the PB level, and by then, the scale of revenue and costs will be completely different.

Walrus's fee model is quite interesting—all storage fees are paid with native tokens, with 0.5% automatically burned. The current burn rate isn't very noticeable, but from a long-term perspective, it acts as a deflationary engine. Once storage demand truly explodes, the burn rate will accelerate significantly. Coupled with a circulating supply rate of only 31.5%, the supply and demand dynamics will become even more compelling.

Last December's hackathon fostered a batch of projects—storage marketplace Storewave, video platforms, and similar applications—all injecting actual usage into the protocol. These projects are launching successively this year, and fee data should reflect real improvements.

From an investment perspective, the current tokens are more like growth options. At $0.158, the market cap is about $250 million, an 80% correction from the peak of $0.76 in May last year. Most of the risk has been released. The rest of the story depends on whether the ecosystem can truly take off.