New Member of the Sui Ecosystem Walrus: The Rise of Innovative Storage Solutions

Recently, a new competitor has emerged in the decentralized storage field - Walrus. As the latest member of the Sui ecosystem, Walrus aims to bring new possibilities to decentralized storage through innovative technological solutions.

Background Overview

Walrus, launched by the development team Mysten Labs behind Sui, is a decentralized storage network built on Sui. Notably, while Walrus is closely related to Sui, using Walrus does not require developing applications on Sui. Walrus will introduce its own governance token, WAL, as a utility token for its ecosystem.

In the field of decentralized storage, existing solutions are mainly divided into two categories: complete replication systems and Reed-Solomon (RS) coding systems. The former, such as Filecoin and Arweave, provide high availability but face the issue of high storage overhead; the latter, while reducing storage costs, encounters challenges in computational efficiency when applied at scale.

The Core Innovation of Walrus

In response to the limitations of existing solutions, Walrus has proposed a new solution:

1. RedStuff Encoding Algorithm: Walrus has developed a 2D encoding algorithm called RedStuff, specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. This algorithm encodes data into primary slices and secondary slices through simple XOR operations, achieving efficient data recovery while maintaining a low replication factor (4-5 times).

2. Efficient Committee Reconfiguration Protocol: To address the natural attrition of storage nodes, Walrus has designed an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to ensure the continuous availability of data.

3. Asynchronous Challenge Protocol: Walrus introduces a new asynchronous challenge protocol to verify whether nodes are storing data correctly. The cost of this protocol grows logarithmically with the number of stored files, significantly enhancing the system's scalability.

4. Innovative Economic Model: Walrus adopts a staking-based economic model, combining rewards and penalties to provide reasonable incentives for participants.

Technical Advantages

The technical solution of Walrus has the following advantages compared to existing solutions:

• Faster encoding/decoding speed: Compared to RS coding, RedStuff uses simple XOR operations, significantly improving processing speed.
• Lower storage overhead: While maintaining high reliability, Walrus controls the replication factor to 4-5 times, comparable to existing cloud services.
• Higher scalability: The system can scale to hundreds of nodes while maintaining high elasticity and fault tolerance.
• More efficient data recovery: Even when some nodes are unavailable, other nodes can efficiently recover lost data shards.

Future Outlook

The Walrus project plans to launch an independent token, WAL, for functions such as staking and governance. Although the specific token distribution mechanism has not been announced, holding SUI may be one way to receive a WAL airdrop.

The testnet for Walrus is about to be launched, while the mainnet launch time is still being planned. For developers and users, now is a great time to learn about and explore this emerging storage solution.

Overall, Walrus, with its innovative technological solutions and close integration with the Sui ecosystem, is expected to bring new breakthroughs in the field of decentralized storage, providing users with more efficient and reliable storage services.