The Sui ecosystem introduces the innovative storage solution Walrus, which may bring new breakthroughs for Decentralization storage.

The decentralized storage network Arweave has successfully achieved ecological and popularity resurgence by launching the computing layer AO. The general-purpose computing chain Sui has also launched its own decentralized storage network Walrus, which may stir up a new wave in the storage field.

Background Introduction

Team Background

The development company behind Sui is Mysten Labs, most of whose founders and employees come from Meta('s original Facebook) dissolved blockchain project Diem. Walrus is Mysten Labs' latest decentralized storage network product, classified as "protocol, platform". The English meaning of Walrus is "walrus", and its official website uses slogans like "Thrive like a walrus" and "Adapt like a walrus", emphasizing the reliability and usability of the protocol as a storage system.

and the relationship with Sui

Although Walrus is built on Sui and utilizes Sui to coordinate storage space and metadata sales, using Walrus does not require building applications or products on Sui. Walrus will also launch a separate governance token, WAL, as a utility token, instead of using SUI.

Industry Status

Currently, decentralized storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and systems using Reed-Solomon( RS) encoding. Representatives of fully replicated systems include a well-known storage platform and a certain blockchain storage network. The advantage is that there are complete files on the storage nodes, allowing for easy access and migration of files even if some nodes go offline. However, these systems require a large number of storage replicas to achieve high security, resulting in enormous storage costs and making them susceptible to Sybil attacks.

A system using Reed-Solomon (RS) coding splits files into small slices, and as long as the total size of the slices exceeds that of the original file, it can be decoded. However, the computational overhead of RS coding limits the file size and the number of participating nodes. Additionally, a large amount of data transfer is required when replacing nodes, which reduces storage efficiency.

Regardless of the solution adopted, existing decentralized storage systems still face ongoing challenges in verification and node coordination, which limits system scalability and increases complexity.

Core Innovations of Walrus

In the face of these challenges, Walrus has proposed new solutions:

1. Innovative Coding Technology: Walrus has launched RedStuff, a brand new 2D coding algorithm. It is based on fountain codes, combining fast operations and high reliability. RedStuff encodes data into primary slices and secondary slices through simple XOR operations, distributed across storage nodes.

2. Efficient Fault Tolerance Mechanism: RedStuff adopts recovery thresholds from different dimensions, achieving asynchronous writing and asynchronous storage proof while maintaining a low replication factor ( less than 5 times ). This allows the system to scale to hundreds of nodes and provides high elasticity and fault tolerance.

3. Innovative Committee Reconfiguration Protocol: Walrus has designed an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to address the natural attrition of storage nodes. The 2D encoding of RedStuff makes state migration more efficient, allowing other nodes to recover lost shards even if some nodes are unavailable.

4. Asynchronous Challenge Protocol: Walrus introduces an asynchronous challenge protocol to verify whether nodes correctly store data. This protocol allows for efficient storage proofs, ensuring data availability without relying on network assumptions, with costs expanding logarithmically with the number of stored files.

5. Innovative Economic Model: Walrus adopts a staking-based economic model, combining reward and penalty mechanisms. The innovative storage certification mechanism scales logarithmically with the number of stored files, reducing the cost of proving file storage.

In summary, Walrus is centered around the RedStuff protocol, providing a scalable, highly resilient, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution. It is capable of delivering storage services with high authenticity, integrity, auditability, and availability at a reasonable cost.

Future Outlook

The Walrus project plans to launch an independent token, WAL, for staking, governance, and other functions. Currently, Walrus is preparing to launch the testnet, and the mainnet launch date has not yet been determined. Interested developers can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy their own websites.

This innovative storage solution is expected to bring new breakthroughs to the field of Decentralization storage, driving the development of the entire industry. With the upcoming launch of the testnet, we will be able to further verify the actual performance and application prospects of Walrus.