Starting in 2026, it will be necessary to pay attention to Walrus, a decentralized storage project in the Sui ecosystem. Its pain points are very specific: high costs and reliability issues for large-scale data stored on-chain. Walrus uses RedStuff erasure coding technology to shard data and disperse it across hundreds of nodes, so even if some nodes fail, data integrity remains unaffected. Storage costs are well-controlled—about five times the original data size—showing a clear advantage over other solutions.

The WAL token is the driving force behind this system. Users need WAL to pay for storage fees (the protocol design anchors costs to fiat currency, so price fluctuations do not directly impact users), node operators earn rewards through staking WAL, and also participate in maintaining network security. Governance decisions also require token holder voting, which is a typical PoS + governance model.

Since its mainnet launch nearly a year ago, the ecosystem applications are gradually taking shape: on-chain data management needed by AI agents, dynamic NFT asset storage, decentralized website content hosting. These scenarios indicate that Walrus is evolving from a simple storage tool into the infrastructure of a data marketplace—data that is programmable, verifiable, and tradable.

For those building Web3 applications or interested in AI + blockchain directions, Walrus is indeed worth paying attention to. It is not just a storage layer but also involves the underlying architecture of the future data economy.