When looking at Walrus's staking data, many people are often shocked—close to 1 billion WAL tokens, worth over $156 million, are locked in the network. These numbers indeed speak volumes: high community engagement and strong network support. But digging deeper, there's something behind this data system worth pondering.

In the realm of decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN), the total locked value (TVL) has almost become the sole metric for assessing project health. Walrus's ability to reach nearly 1 billion WAL and over $150 million in staked value is certainly competitive. According to the design logic, users stake tokens to ensure the security and reliability of storage nodes while earning passive income.

Sounds reasonable. Especially during the recent Epoch 18, which distributed a reward of 12 million WAL. A simple calculation of annualized returns based on this data looks quite impressive.

But there's a glaring issue—WAL's price trend and these staking enthusiasm are almost unrelated. From the all-time high of $0.76, it has fallen to $0.15. What does this gap mean? High staking rewards can't hold the token price. What does this reveal? A serious misalignment exists between the incentive mechanism design and actual value capture. The attractive staking yields seem somewhat pale in the face of token depreciation.