The dilemma of Web3 storage has always been a pain point in the industry. Until recently, Walrus Protocol, which had been quietly operating within the Sui ecosystem, suddenly announced a major move—officially becoming a fully autonomous decentralized storage network. This is not just a simple ecosystem separation but an attempt to redefine the foundational infrastructure of storage.

Speaking of Walrus's ambitions, 12TiB of data storage is just the tip of the iceberg. At the Breaking the Ice conference, over 200 core developers actively participated in this independence through code, casting their trust votes. Now, this change is officially presented to the entire community.

What does independence mean? It means Walrus is no longer constrained by a single ecosystem, allowing it to pursue even higher performance, build an economic system dedicated to the storage layer, and open up a broad space for distributed storage itself.

To support this ambition, Walrus launched its native token $WAL. This token plays a crucial role—storage nodes need to stake $WAL to qualify for operation, and the community participates in network governance decisions by holding $WAL. An independent Walrus Foundation has also been established, dedicated to ecosystem development and builder incentives.

From a technical perspective, Walrus employs a unique coding scheme to ensure data security and decentralization. Files are split and stored across thousands of independent nodes, with a "seamless hot-swapping" mechanism to ensure storage persistence and high availability. The white paper details the entire system operation logic—from the economic cycle design of $WAL, how to enable storage providers to earn reasonable returns, to cost optimization for storage users.

More interestingly, beyond a stable infrastructure, Walrus also plans multi-layered innovative features: low-cost proof-of-storage challenge mechanisms, paid high-quality read services, and even light node users can participate in network maintenance to earn rewards. These designs greatly expand the application imagination of the storage network.

From an ecosystem perspective, Walrus's path to independence answers a long-standing unresolved question: what kind of storage infrastructure does the Web3 world truly need? It is not about following trends or being subordinate, but about defining the future of the storage layer through independence and self-reliance. This may well be the true beginning of mature distributed storage.