The Sui ecosystem welcomes a new member for Decentralization storage: Walrus

After the launch of the computing layer AO by Arweave, it successfully drove the rebound in its token price, ecosystem, and popularity. As a general-purpose computing chain, Sui has also launched the decentralized storage network Walrus. What impact will this have on the Sui ecosystem?

Background Introduction

Team

Walrus is the latest decentralized storage network product launched by a certain company. Most of the founders and employees of this company were involved in a blockchain project that was dissolved by a large tech company. The English meaning of Walrus is "walrus," and its official website emphasizes characteristics of being robust and adaptable, highlighting the reliability and availability of this 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 new governance token, WAL, as a functional token instead of using the SUI token.

Competitor Comparison

Decentralization storage protocols are generally divided into two main categories: fully replicated systems and those using Reed-Solomon(RS) encoding. A well-known storage project represents fully replicated systems, which have the advantage of complete availability of files on storage nodes, but face high storage overhead and potential risks of Sybil attacks. Although RS encoding systems offer higher storage efficiency, they encounter issues such as high computational overhead and difficulty in node replacement.

Challenges faced by storage

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 require complex coordination mechanisms, which is why many systems introduce custom blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

Core Innovation

Walrus leverages innovative erasure coding technology to quickly and robustly encode data into small shards, which are then distributed and stored across a network of nodes. Even if a large portion of the shards is lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed. This method maintains a replication factor of 4-5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, while offering the advantages of Decentralization and greater fault tolerance.

Walrus has introduced RedStuff, a 2D coding algorithm specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes, combining fast operations with high reliability. It encodes data into primary and secondary slices through simple XOR operations and distributes these slices across storage nodes.

The advantages of RedStuff include:

• Compared to RS coding, the encoding/decoding speed is faster.
• Low storage overhead, the system can scale to hundreds of nodes
• High elasticity and fault tolerance, able to recover data even in the case of Byzantine faults.

Walrus also introduces an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol and an asynchronous challenge protocol to verify whether nodes correctly store data. Its economic model is based on staking, combined with reward and penalty mechanisms. The innovative storage certification mechanism scales logarithmically with the number of stored files, reducing the cost of proving file storage.

Potential Airdrop

Walrus will launch an independent WAL token for functions such as staking and governance. One possible way to receive the WAL airdrop is to hold SUI tokens. Walrus is expected to launch a testnet soon, with the mainnet launch date to be determined. Currently, you can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy websites.

Overall, Walrus is centered around the RedStuff protocol, providing a scalable, highly elastic, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution. With Sui as its control layer, Walrus can focus on addressing the core issues of Decentralization storage, offering users storage services with high authenticity, integrity, auditability, and availability.