Sui officially launches a new decentralized storage solution, Walrus

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully drove the return of AR coin price, ecosystem, and popularity. What impact will the decentralized storage network Walrus, launched by the general-purpose computing chain Sui, bring?

Background Introduction

team

Walrus is the latest product classified as "protocol, platform" by Mysten Labs, and it is a Decentralization storage network. Most of the founders and employees of Mysten Labs come from the blockchain project Diem, which was dissolved by Meta. The official website of Walrus features slogans like "Thrive like a walrus" and "Adapt like a walrus," conveying the reliability and availability of the protocol as a storage system.

and the relationship with Sui

Walrus is built on Sui and utilizes Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata. However, using Walrus does not require building applications or products on Sui. Walrus will launch a brand new governance token WAL as a functional token, instead of using SUI.

Competitive Product Comparison

Decentralization storage protocols are usually divided into two main categories:

1. Complete replication system: such as Filecoin and Arweave. The advantage is the availability of complete files on storage nodes, while the disadvantage is the high storage cost.

2. System using Reed-Solomon(RS) encoding: Divide files into smaller slices. The advantage is high storage efficiency, while the disadvantage is that the encoding and decoding process has a large computational overhead.

Challenges Facing Storage

Existing decentralized storage systems still face two additional challenges:

1. Continuous challenges are needed to ensure that storage nodes retain data, which limits the scalability of the system.

2. Storage nodes need to coordinate, including managing participants, file storage costs, incentive mechanisms, etc.

Core Innovation

Walrus innovatively uses erasure coding technology to quickly and robustly encode unstructured data blocks into smaller shards, which are distributed across a network of storage nodes. Even with up to two-thirds of the shards lost, the original data block can be rapidly reconstructed using partial shards. This is possible while maintaining a replication factor of only 4 to 5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, while also offering the advantages of Decentralization and greater fault tolerance.

Walrus has launched RedStuff, a brand new 2D encoding algorithm specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes, combining the advantages of fast operations and high reliability. It encodes data into primary and secondary slices through simple XOR operations, distributed across storage nodes.

The advantages of RedStuff include:

1. Faster encoding/decoding speed.
2. Low storage overhead, the system can scale to hundreds of nodes.
3. With high elasticity and fault tolerance.

Walrus is also equipped with an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to address the natural attrition of storage nodes, ensuring continuous data availability. The introduced asynchronous challenge protocol verifies whether nodes are storing data correctly, with costs expanding logarithmically with the number of stored files.

The economic model of Walrus is based on staking, combining rewards and penalty mechanisms. The innovative storage certification mechanism reduces the cost of storing proof documents.

Potential Airdrop

Walrus will launch an independent token WAL for functions such as staking and governance. Referencing the acquisition methods of similar projects, holding SUI may be a way to receive WAL airdrops.

Walrus is expected to launch its testnet soon, with the mainnet launch date to be determined. You can currently visit the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy your own website.