Walrus is a decentralized data storage protocol built on the Sui Network, focusing on providing high-reliability, low-cost, and programmable large-scale storage solutions for AI, DeFi, blockchain games, and NFT applications.

Current decentralized storage faces several core issues: high data redundancy leading to elevated costs, limited retrieval efficiency, and a lack of deep integration with smart contracts. Walrus's positioning is clear — acting as an "on-chain verifiable and off-chain efficient storage" middleware, bridging the gaps of traditional storage solutions through this design.

From a technical perspective, Walrus adopts three key innovations: first, erasure coding technology, enabling a small number of nodes to recover complete data and significantly reducing storage costs; second, an epoch-based storage mechanism, naturally suited for long-term and high-frequency data needs; and third, native programmable storage capabilities, allowing data states to be directly referenced by smart contracts, which is especially friendly for AI and DeFi applications.

Why choose Sui? This is not simply an ecosystem port. Sui’s Object Model combined with a parallel execution architecture provides a foundation with high TPS and low latency, perfectly fitting large-scale data read/write operations. More importantly, this architecture offers genuine underlying support for the concept of "storage as an asset." In other words, Walrus effectively becomes the data infrastructure layer of the Sui ecosystem.

From the perspective of application potential, scenarios such as AI training data, DeFi contract interactions, and blockchain game state storage can all benefit from this solution. The cost optimization and verifiable features of decentralized storage precisely address the dual needs of data reliability and economic efficiency for these applications.