Recently, a project called Walrus caught my attention, but not because of hype around the concept, rather because its approach to "storage" implementation is somewhat different.

Let's first look at the core design: Walrus uses a blob storage plus erasure coding scheme, which is completely different from the traditional full data replication approach. What does this mean? It encodes the original data, and the storage volume will roughly increase by about 5 times—at first glance, it might seem wasteful, but in distributed systems, this is actually a quite restrained solution. The really interesting part is the subsequent logical chain: treating Sui as the control plane to handle registration, sharding scheduling, and ultimately generating verifiable availability proofs. This entire process makes data truly programmable, rather than simply stuffing things into a hard drive.

In terms of project progress, the mainnet is scheduled to launch on March 27, 2025. They also completed a round of substantial funding—industry reports indicate the token sale was approximately $140 million. This is not just dreaming; it aims to solve the heavy data problems faced by on-chain applications—training data for AI agents, media files like game assets, videos, audio, and emerging fields like data trading markets.

But I have to be honest: the value logic of $WAL isn’t about some consensus mechanism, but whether the "real storage demand + pricing system + node incentives" closed loop can truly operate. If you only focus on the token price fluctuations, you’re missing the point. The real test for this project is: how many developers in the ecosystem will genuinely put their data in, and will they maintain it with long-term payments? That’s the key to how far it can go.