In recent months, I have spent a lot of time studying Walrus's request mechanism, especially the FROST micro-payment system. To be honest, I'm not trying to pick faults or find problems; I just want to understand—this thing called the "public memory layer," how does its underlying economy actually work?

The conclusion is a bit hard-hitting: it’s not really built for public memory; instead, it’s a storage incentive system tailored for the attention economy.

FROST’s true function is straightforward—each time a user requests Blob data, the system automatically transfers a small amount of WAL from the requester’s wallet to the service node, all handled by the client SDK, without the user noticing. The official rhetoric is "incentivizing nodes to provide high-availability storage and bandwidth," which is not wrong, but the underlying logic is more ruthless: turning every access into an on-chain verifiable economic activity.

This directly causes three chain reactions: nodes profit based on actual service volume; popular content naturally attracts more redundant storage; cold data gradually disappears due to lack of payment flow.

According to community data monitoring (2025 Q4), the average survival rate of Blob shards has a strong positive correlation with their request frequency within 30 days—correlation coefficient reaching 0.87. In other words: whether memory can be retained ultimately depends on whether it can generate economic incentives.