When mentioning Walrus, many people's first reaction is to think of it as just another "decentralized storage" project. But to truly understand it, you need to look at the design documentation, consider how it handles consistency, confirmation mechanisms, and Blob structures—careful examination reveals an interesting point: Walrus doesn't care whether you're storing images, videos, or text. What it truly cares about is—whether this piece of data represents the state of a system. This is a crucial point.

**Traditional Storage vs. Walrus's Approach**

Traditional storage systems aim to solve three questions: Can I store data? Can I retrieve data? Is it cheap?

Walrus's logic is entirely different; it addresses three other questions: Is the data verifiable? Is the write operation irreversible? Is it part of the system's state?

For example: When you upload a file to a cloud storage service, no one knows when you modified, deleted, or replaced it. But once Walrus's Blob is confirmed, it becomes a historical fact that cannot be tampered with. This makes Walrus more like a "state log layer" rather than a traditional hard drive.

From an architectural perspective, it resembles a combination of a database + consensus system + erasure coding network, rather than the logic of IPFS.

**Why is it more like a state machine than a hard drive**

Walrus isn't just simple data replication—it uses erasure coding to split a Blob into multiple shards, dispersing them across network nodes. For example, a 1GB data might be encoded into 20 shards, and only a subset of these is needed to recover the full data. This design fundamentally builds a distributed state recording system, rather than a traditional file storage network.