Speaking of $WAL, this is Mysten Labs' new move—those seasoned engineers who previously worked at Meta are now applying their expertise in the Sui ecosystem to the storage track.

Storage has been around for a while, but truly scalable infrastructure capable of handling TB-level data is rare. Walrus takes a completely different approach—it abandons the traditional bulky and costly full redundancy backup scheme and instead adopts RedStuff, a 2D erasure coding technology.

The principle behind this is actually to break large files into fragments, disperse them, and distribute them to storage nodes worldwide. Rather than being just a warehouse, it's more like a super hard drive that never goes offline. Even if the network collapses to only a small fraction of nodes remaining, as long as the proportion of data fragments is sufficient, the original content can be reconstructed in minutes with millisecond-level recovery speed.

On the cost side, this is the key. Traditional storage protocols replicate data hundreds of times, which wildly consumes hard drive lifespan and network bandwidth. Walrus requires less than 5x redundancy to achieve the same security—this efficiency boost directly gives decentralized storage a weapon to compete with traditional cloud services.

What's even more impressive is its native integration with Sui. In this ecosystem, data is no longer just static files stored on disks but active assets that can be directly accessed by smart contracts. This programmability opens up entirely new possibilities.