Imagine this scenario: you move out of a strictly managed shared apartment, buy your own island, and set your own rules. This is the transformation that Walrus is currently experiencing.

In the past, Walrus performed well within the Sui high-performance blockchain ecosystem. With numerous developers, 12TiB of data stored, and stable operation. But ultimately, it was still constrained by the architecture of the entire Sui network—limited space and a pace of iteration that couldn’t keep up with independent development needs.

The turning point has arrived. The core team and community of Walrus reached a consensus: it’s time to go independent. They decided to establish the "Walrus Network," a fully autonomous distributed storage ecosystem.

In this new ecosystem, the logic is simple. $WAL tokens serve both as access passes and governance rights. Want to operate a storage node? Exchange $WAL for qualification. Holding tokens? Then you have the right to vote on network parameters and development directions.

The white paper defines the entire operational mechanism: how data is split into fragments, encrypted, dispersed across multiple nodes, and how data integrity is maintained during node rotation. These are not just theoretical plans—they are carefully thought-out coding schemes and cross-Epoch reconfiguration mechanisms.

The Walrus Foundation acts as the builder and connector. They drive ecosystem development, fund developers, and facilitate external collaborations. And Sui? It has evolved from a close-knit relationship into a friendly neighbor—both sides conduct data settlement and message synchronization through cross-chain interactions, remaining independent yet mutually empowering.

What does independence mean? It means no longer being bound by others’ decision-making pace, being able to tailor economic incentive systems for specific use cases, and enabling faster trial-and-error and iteration.

For storage node operators, data application teams, and ecosystem participants, this is a brand-new opportunity. Walrus’s path to independence has just begun.