A New Approach to Decentralized Storage: Analyzing the Technological Innovations of Walrus

The decentralized storage network Arweave has successfully achieved the return of coin prices, ecology, and popularity by launching the computing layer AO. Meanwhile, as a general-purpose computing chain, Sui has launched the decentralized storage network Walrus, which will also create a new wave in this field.

Background Overview

Walrus is the latest Decentralization storage network product launched by a certain blockchain development company. Most of the founders and employees of the company come from a blockchain project of a large technology company that has been dissolved. Walrus is built on Sui, utilizing Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata. Notably, using Walrus does not require building applications or products on Sui, and Walrus will launch an independent governance token, WAL.

Challenges of Existing Storage Solutions

Currently, decentralized storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and Reed-Solomon (RS) coding systems. Fully replicated systems, like a certain well-known storage project, have the advantage of complete files on storage nodes, allowing easy access and migration of files even if some nodes go offline. However, these systems require a large number of storage replicas, leading to high storage costs.

The RS encoding system splits files into small slices, and as long as the total size of the slices exceeds the original file, the original file can be decoded. However, the computational overhead of RS encoding is high, which limits the file size and the number of participating nodes. Additionally, a large amount of data transmission is required when nodes are replaced, reducing storage efficiency.

Regardless of the solution adopted, the existing system still faces two major challenges: the need for a continuous challenge mechanism to ensure data integrity and the coordination issues between storage nodes. These challenges limit the scalability of the system and lead to the implementation of custom blockchains.

Walrus's Core Innovation

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

1. RedStuff Algorithm: This is a brand new 2D coding algorithm designed specifically for Byzantine fault tolerance. It is based on fountain codes and combines fast operations with high reliability.

2. Efficient Encoding: Through simple XOR operations, RedStuff encodes data into primary slices and secondary slices, distributed across storage nodes. This method is faster than traditional RS encoding and has lower storage overhead.

3. Asynchronous Storage Proof: The first implementation of asynchronous storage proof, with a total replication factor of less than 5 times, far below the 25 times of some competitors.

4. High elasticity and fault tolerance: The system can scale to hundreds of nodes and can recover data even in the case of Byzantine faults.

5. Efficient Committee Reconfiguration: Ensure continuous availability of data during natural attrition of storage nodes.

6. Asynchronous Challenge Protocol: Verifying the correctness of node storage, with costs expanding logarithmically with the number of stored files.

7. Staking-based economic model: Combining rewards and penalties, it reduces the cost of storing proof documents.

Future Outlook

The Walrus project plans to launch an independent token WAL for staking and governance. The testnet will be launched soon, and the mainnet launch date is to be determined. Developers can now refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy websites.

Walrus, as a new generation of decentralized storage solution, is expected to bring significant changes to the storage field with its innovative technology and efficient design. Its low cost, high elasticity, and scalability characteristics provide new possibilities for the future development of decentralized storage.