As a long-term developer focused on blockchain infrastructure, I recently caught sight of a project—Walrus, a decentralized storage protocol built on the Sui blockchain.

It addresses very practical issues. Traditional cloud storage has three major pain points: risks of centralized data management, high operational costs, and the possibility of tampering. Walrus employs erasure coding technology to make a clever design—breaking files into fragments and dispersing them across a global network of nodes. Even if some nodes go offline, data can still be fully recovered. This is especially critical for AI training that requires massive amounts of data.

I tested it on the testnet, uploading a 5GB dataset in less than a minute. The cost is over 70% cheaper compared to AWS. The most interesting part is that it has a built-in data marketplace—users can publish data, set prices, and developers and enterprises can directly purchase and verify. Isn’t this laying the infrastructure for an AI economy?

From the perspective of the $WAL token, as an ecosystem native token, it serves as the settlement unit for the entire network. Storage fees, validator staking, and governance participation are all driven by it. With a total supply of 5 billion tokens, and as usage grows and fees are burned, there is an expected appreciation in token value.

The Sui ecosystem has been quite hot recently, and Walrus, as a foundational infrastructure builder for storage, is logically well-positioned.