The story of the internet has been told for decades, with a core logic: platforms control data and platform profits. In Web3, this script is about to be reversed.

From a different perspective, data in the internet era is like "crude oil," requiring platforms to refine it to generate value; in the Web3 era, there's a new approach—making data directly tradable as "refined commodities." This shift sounds simple, but in reality, it represents a paradigm leap from "I own your data" to "I can verify the authenticity of the data."

What is the traditional internet model? Platform = owner of data. Users produce content, platforms own, control, and monetize it, resulting in data monopolies and privacy issues everywhere. Web3 aims to solve this by returning data ownership to users, but there's a tough problem: now that users own their data, how can third parties verify that the data is genuine and complete without trusting the platform?

This is where verifiable storage layers like Walrus come into play. Their approach is as follows: user data is stored in Walrus's decentralized network, with ownership always belonging to the user; any DApp or smart contract can verify the authenticity and integrity of the data directly through on-chain stored data hashes, without any trust relationships, and then trigger corresponding logic. In other words, data is neither controlled by any platform nor unreliable; it can reliably generate credit, drive contract execution, and support asset minting.

In this system, the role of the WAL token is clear: it is the fuel for the "data verification economy." It pays storage nodes, serves as the settlement unit for global verification services, and its value is proportional to the network's overall demand for trusted data.

Therefore, what Walrus is doing is not just providing storage space but building the infrastructure for Web3-native data value exchange—allowing data to create genuine, trustworthy value without being "owned."