Everyone can see that the throughput of public chains is indeed getting faster and faster. But there is an awkward fact in front of us: it's expensive.

Imagine you want to store a high-definition image or 4K video on the chain, just the Gas fee alone can make you feel distressed for a long time. So what is the reality? The vast majority of NFT projects and social protocols play a little trick — they only store the "ticket" to access data on the chain, while the actual file content still resides honestly on a centralized server of a certain company. Once their data center goes down, your proud assets turn into a 404 error page. Isn't that equivalent to buying an empty shell?

This is exactly the problem that Walrus aims to treat with powerful medicine.

**What exactly is Walrus?**

Simply put, it is a decentralized storage and data availability protocol developed by Mysten Labs (the technical team behind the Sui ecosystem). Think of it as a "high-efficiency, low-cost, truly decentralized cloud drive" in Web3. But note one thing: it is not trying to directly challenge old players like Filecoin that are suitable for cold data permanent storage. Walrus targets the "hot data" track — those frequently read, real-time accessed videos, images, game resources, and AI model data.

**Why can Walrus overtake others in a bend?**

Some may ask: Isn't decentralized storage already available with Arweave and Filecoin? Why can Walrus break through?

The answer lies in its core technology: erasure coding.

To put it simply: suppose you want to save an important document. The traditional way is to make 10 copies and store them in 10 places. But erasure coding works differently — it splits the data into 256 parts, and only any 195 of them are needed to fully recover the data. The remaining 61 parts serve as insurance. This guarantees data redundancy and security, while significantly reducing storage costs. In a decentralized network, this means lower storage fees, faster read speeds, and stronger fault tolerance.

The effect of this technological combination is that Walrus can achieve reliability comparable to large storage networks using fewer storage nodes and lower economic costs. For NFT creators, game developers, and social applications, this means significantly reduced costs and a direct improvement in user experience.