Innovative Storage Solution Walrus: A New Chapter in Decentralization Storage

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully drove the recovery of its coin price, ecosystem, and popularity. Meanwhile, Sui, as a general-purpose computing chain, is set to create a new wave in this field with the launch of its decentralized storage network Walrus.

Background Overview

Walrus is the latest product launched by Mysten Labs, the development company behind Sui, positioned as a Decentralization storage network. Although it is built on Sui, using Walrus does not require developing applications on Sui. Walrus will launch a separate governance token, WAL, as its functional token.

Currently, decentralized storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and systems using Reed-Solomon(RS) encoding. Fully replicated systems such as Filecoin and Arweave have high availability but large storage overhead; RS encoding systems reduce storage overhead but face challenges in computational complexity and recovery efficiency.

In addition, existing decentralized storage systems still face ongoing challenges with verification and coordination of storage nodes, which limits the scalability of the system.

Core Innovations of Walrus

Walrus has introduced a new 2D coding algorithm called RedStuff, designed specifically for Byzantine fault tolerance. This algorithm is based on fountain codes, combining the advantages of fast operation and high reliability.

RedStuff encodes data into primary and secondary slices using a simple XOR operation, distributed across storage nodes. It employs recovery thresholds of different dimensions to achieve asynchronous writing and asynchronous storage proofs while maintaining a low overall replication factor (less than 5 times).

Compared to RS coding, RedStuff's encoding/decoding speed is faster, storage overhead is low, it can be scaled to hundreds of nodes, and it has high elasticity and fault tolerance.

Walrus is also equipped with an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to address the natural attrition of storage nodes, ensuring the continuous availability of data. The 2D encoding of RedStuff makes state migration more efficient, allowing other nodes to recover lost slices even when some nodes are unavailable.

In addition, Walrus introduces an asynchronous challenge protocol to verify the correct storage of nodes, with costs logarithmically scaling with the number of storage files. Its economic model is based on staking, combined with rewards and penalty mechanisms, and the innovative storage certification mechanism reduces the costs of proving file storage.

Future Outlook

Walrus is about to launch its testnet, with the mainnet launch time to be determined. The functions of the WAL token will include staking and governance. Potential ways to obtain the WAL airdrop may include holding SUI.

Walrus, with its innovative RedStuff protocol, provides a scalable, highly elastic, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution. With Sui as the control layer, Walrus can focus on addressing the core issues of Decentralization storage, bringing new possibilities to this field.