By early 2026, when it comes to the most promising and certain infrastructure projects in the Sui ecosystem, Walrus ($WAL) has almost become a collective consensus among institutions and on-chain influencers.

The technical approach of this project is actually very clear, summarized in three points: extremely low redundancy, high resilience, and programmability. Walrus has developed a combination of Red Stuff erasure coding and distributed scheduling, which has effectively reduced the replication factor for large file storage to around 4.5 times (based on actual mainnet data). Even more impressive, under fault tolerance capable of withstanding over 2/3 of nodes going offline, it has also cut storage costs—current pricing is already close to 1.3 to 1.9 times that of AWS S3, giving it a significant cost advantage in the decentralized storage track.

But Walrus's smartest aspect isn't just its technical metrics; it's that it truly makes storage a first-class citizen on the Sui chain. All stored Blob data generate complete Move objects on-chain, allowing developers to directly write contract logic on these objects. This opens up a realm of possibilities—AI model access rights billed by usage time or frequency, automated "burn after reading" or time-delayed content releases, ownership trading of dataset shards, creator subscription revenue models, exclusive member content, tip integrations with storage, on-chain dynamic websites, and decentralized CDN infrastructure—all of these can be directly implemented.

Since the mainnet officially launched in March 2025, Walrus has accumulated over 23PB of real data, and this growth rate indicates that the ecosystem's enthusiasm is indeed there.