Web3 storage has yet to find a perfect solution. Think about what we need to store now—4K videos, 3D model files, AI model weights that are often dozens of GB, and even entire virtual world scene data. These big data sets pose unprecedented demands on storage.

Traditional solutions each have their pitfalls. Cloud storage platforms are stable, but your data's fate is entirely in their hands, with almost no transparency, and it can be censored or taken down at any time. What about decentralized solutions? They do protect data security, but using them is a nightmare—upload speeds are painfully slow, access latency can be several seconds, and costs are sky-high. I’ve personally tried using a well-known decentralized solution to store training data; it took half a day just to upload, and every access afterward required waiting a few seconds. Storing 1TB of data for a year can easily cost a few hundred dollars.

Mysten Labs’ Walrus protocol arrived just in time. It’s not just a simple upgrade of decentralized hard drives but a high-performance storage infrastructure designed specifically for modern application scenarios. The key is that it truly balances speed, cost, and security—three elements that are usually mutually restrictive—something rarely seen in previous solutions. Architecturally, Walrus introduces the concept of Blobs, redefining how large data blocks are stored, enabling it to maintain stable performance when handling TB-level data.