Recently, I helped a friend with a data ecosystem project and truly understood what it means to "generate value from user data."

At first, I thought Walrus was just a storage tool, but I found it was much more than that. The project mainly targets electric vehicle owners—allowing them to control their sensitive data such as battery information and driving trajectories. Previously, using other storage solutions, either privacy protections were superficial or the monetization process was so complicated that users gave up. After switching to Walrus, through Seal for access control, car owners can decide who to authorize their data to. In just three months, over 2,000 car owners joined, with an average monthly income increase of about $30 per person. Monetization channels include carbon credits and insurance discounts.

What impressed me most is its cross-project collaboration capability. Once the car owner’s data is stored on-chain, it can connect to the carbon trading platform and synchronize with the health data market without repeated uploads—automatic settlement of all earnings on-chain. This seamless interoperability is something other storage solutions simply can't offer. The Quilt tool is used to package vehicle operation logs at the KB level, reducing storage costs to 1/420 of the original, and the SUI ecosystem’s Gas fees are cut by more than half, significantly lowering the participation barrier for ordinary users.

Regarding data security, RedStuff encoding is solid. When several storage nodes went offline recently, vehicle data was automatically recovered through primary and secondary slicing mechanisms, with no leaks or data loss during the process. This fault-tolerance mechanism truly reassures users.

Later, I also staked a small amount of tokens, mainly attracted by this "data rights confirmation + monetization" closed-loop logic. The annualized staking yield remains around 8%, and each storage transaction burns tokens, increasing the deflationary nature. Now, more than ten ecosystem projects have been implemented, expanding data types from vehicle logs to health records, turning user information into truly controllable assets.

There are many projects in the Web3 storage field, but few can genuinely let users earn real income. If this model continues to improve, long-term holding will indeed be quite reassuring.