The Sui ecosystem welcomes a new decentralized storage solution, Walrus

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully triggered a rebound in its token price, ecosystem, and attention, marking a successful turnaround. What kind of waves will the decentralized storage network Walrus, launched by the general-purpose computing chain Sui, create in the industry?

Background Introduction

Team

Walrus is the latest decentralized storage network product launched by a certain blockchain development company. Most of the founders and employees of this company come from a blockchain project that was dissolved by a large technology company.

The English meaning of Walrus is "walrus". On its official website, there are slogans such as "growing robust like a walrus" and "adapting strongly like a walrus", conveying the reliability and availability of this protocol as a storage system.

and its 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 utility token, instead of using SUI.

Competitive Comparison

Decentralization storage protocols are typically divided into two main categories: fully replicated systems and systems using Reed-Solomon (RS) coding. The advantage of fully replicated systems is that there are complete files on the storage nodes, allowing for easy access and migration of files even if a certain node goes offline. However, this type of system requires a large number of storage copies to achieve high security, resulting in enormous storage overhead.

A system using RS encoding splits files into small chunks, and as long as the total size exceeds the original file, it can be decoded. However, RS encoding has a high computational overhead, which limits the file size and the number of participating nodes. Additionally, the node replacement process is complex and may lead to a large amount of data transmission.

The challenges faced by storage

Regardless of the replication protocol used, existing decentralized storage systems still face two main challenges:

1. A continuous challenge mechanism is needed to ensure that storage nodes retain data, which limits the scalability of the system.
2. Storage nodes need to coordinate, understand the participants in the system, the payment situation for file storage fees, and manage incentive mechanisms and abuse prevention measures.

Core Innovation

Walrus has proposed innovative solutions to these challenges:

By employing a novel erasure coding technology, Walrus can quickly and robustly encode unstructured data blocks into small shards, which are then distributed across a node network. Even with the loss of up to two-thirds of the shards, the original data can be rapidly reconstructed using the remaining shards. This method keeps the replication factor between 4-5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, while also providing the advantages of Decentralization and greater fault resilience.

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

The main advantages of RedStuff include:

• Compared to RS coding, using simple XOR operations makes the encoding/decoding speed faster.
• Low storage overhead allows the system to scale to hundreds of nodes, with high resilience and fault tolerance.
• Data can be recovered even in the case of Byzantine faults.

Walrus is also equipped with an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to address the natural attrition of storage nodes, ensuring data remains continuously available. RedStuff's 2D encoding makes state migration more efficient, allowing other nodes to recover lost slices even if some nodes are unavailable.

In addition, Walrus introduces an asynchronous challenge protocol to verify whether nodes are correctly storing data. This protocol allows for efficient storage proofs, ensuring data availability without relying on network assumptions, with its cost expanding logarithmically with the number of storage files.

The economic model of Walrus is based on staking, combined with rewards and penalty mechanisms. The innovative storage certification mechanism expands logarithmically with the number of stored files, reducing the cost of proving file storage.

In summary, Walrus, centered around the RedStuff protocol, offers a scalable, resilient, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution that can provide high authenticity, integrity, auditability, and availability at a reasonable cost.

Future Outlook

Walrus will launch an independent token WAL for purposes such as staking and governance. Holding SUI may be a way to obtain the WAL airdrop.

Walrus is expected to launch its testnet soon, with the mainnet launch time to be determined. Currently, you can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy your own website.