New Member of the Sui Ecosystem Walrus: The Innovative Path of Decentralization Storage

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully achieved the return of its ecosystem and popularity. As a general-purpose computing chain, Sui has also launched its own decentralized storage network Walrus, which will undoubtedly create new waves in the storage field.

Background Overview

Walrus is the latest product launched by Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, positioned as a Decentralization storage network. The project name "Walrus" means "walrus," highlighting its reliability and adaptability as a storage system.

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

Limitations of Current Storage Solutions

Currently, decentralized storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and Reed-Solomon(RS) encoding systems. Fully replicated systems ensure high availability of files but come with significant storage overhead and potential risks of Sybil attacks. RS encoding systems reduce storage overhead but face issues such as high computational complexity and difficulties in data recovery.

In addition, existing decentralized storage systems still face ongoing challenges in verifying and coordinating storage nodes, which limit the scalability of the system.

Core Innovations of Walrus

Walrus can quickly and robustly encode data into small fragments using innovative erasure coding technology and distribute them across a node network. Even if most fragments are lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed while maintaining a low replication factor.

Specifically, Walrus introduces a new 2D coding algorithm called RedStuff. This algorithm is based on fountain code design, combining the advantages of fast operation and high reliability. RedStuff encodes data into primary slices and secondary slices through simple XOR operations and distributes these slices among storage nodes.

The main advantages of RedStuff include:

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

Walrus is also equipped with an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to address the natural attrition of storage nodes, ensuring continuous data availability. Additionally, its asynchronous challenge protocol efficiently verifies whether nodes are correctly storing data, with costs expanding logarithmically with the number of stored files.

The economic model of Walrus is based on a staking mechanism, combined with rewards and penalty measures. The innovative storage certification mechanism significantly reduces the costs of storing proof documents.

Overall, Walrus is centered around the RedStuff protocol, providing a scalable, highly resilient, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution. Sui, as the control layer of Walrus, offers scalable, programmable, and secure infrastructure support.

Future Outlook

The Walrus project plans to launch an independent WAL token for functions such as staking and governance. Although the specific token distribution plan has not been announced, holding SUI may be a way to receive WAL airdrops.

The Walrus testnet is about to launch, with the mainnet launch time to be determined. Interested developers can consult the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy their own websites.

With the development of Walrus, we have reason to expect it will bring new possibilities to the field of Decentralization storage and push the entire industry forward.