Sui's official new work Walrus: An innovative solution for decentralized storage

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully triggered an increase in ecological enthusiasm and the rise of coin prices. As a general-purpose computing chain, Sui has now also launched its own decentralized storage network, Walrus. What kind of impact will this have?

! Interpretation of Walrus: Sui's official pro-end, new decentralized storage solution

Background

Team

Walrus is the latest decentralized storage network product launched by Mysten Labs. Mysten Labs is the development company behind Sui, and most of its founders and employees are from Diem, the defunct blockchain project of Meta (formerly Facebook).

Walrus' name is derived from the word "walrus", and its official website emphasizes "thrive like a walrus" and "resilient like a walrus", highlighting the reliability and availability of the protocol as a storage system.

Relationship with Sui

Walrus is built on Sui, which coordinates storage space and metadata sales. However, using Walrus does not require developing an application on Sui, and Walrus will launch a separate governance token, WAL.

The current state of the industry

Currently, there are two main types of decentralized storage protocols:

1. Full replication systems: such as Filecoin and Arweave. The advantage is that the full file is on the storage node, and the file can be accessed even if some nodes are offline. The downside is that it is expensive to store and can be vulnerable to Sybil attacks.

2. Reed-Solomon (RS) encoding system: Divide files into small slices for storage. The advantage is high storage efficiency, and the disadvantage is that the codec calculation is complex, which limits the file size and the number of participating nodes.

In addition, the existing system faced two major challenges:

• Ongoing challenges are required to ensure that nodes retain data
• Requires a complex storage node coordination mechanism

! Interpretation of Walrus: Sui's official pro-end, new decentralized storage solution

Walrus' core innovation

Walrus proposes new solutions to these challenges:

1. RedStuff Encoding Algorithm:
   • Fountain code-based design, optimized for Byzantine fault tolerance
   • Encode data into primary and secondary slices with simple XOR operations
   • Implement asynchronous storage proofs with a total replication factor of less than 5 times
   • Fast encoding and decoding speeds, scalable to hundreds of nodes

! Interpretation of Walrus: Sui's official pro-end, new decentralized storage solution

2. Efficient Committee Reconfiguration Protocol:

   • Addressing the natural loss of nodes to ensure data remains continuously available
   • Efficient state migration with 2D coding

3. Asynchronous Challenge Protocol:

   • Verify that the node is storing the data correctly
   • Cost scales logarithmically with the number of files stored

4. Economic model based on staking:

   • Combine reward and punishment mechanisms
   • Innovative storage authentication mechanism reduces the cost of proof

! Interpretation of Walrus: Sui's official pro-end, new decentralized storage solution

Walrus uses Sui as the control layer to focus on solving the core problems of decentralized storage, providing a scalable, resilient, and economically viable storage solution.

Future Prospects

Walrus will launch a standalone token, WAL, for staking, governance, and more. At present, the testnet will be launched soon, and the mainnet launch time is yet to be determined. Interested developers can check out the official documentation on how to deploy with Walrus website.

As the demand for decentralized storage grows, Walrus, with its innovative technology and the support of the Sui ecosystem, is expected to play an important role in this space.