Sui Ecosystem New Project Walrus: An Innovative Solution for Decentralization Storage

After the launch of the computing layer AO by the decentralized storage network Arweave, the price, ecosystem, and popularity of AR coins have successfully rebounded. As a general computing chain, Sui has also launched its own decentralized storage network Walrus. What new changes will this bring to the industry?

Background Introduction

Team

Walrus is the latest "protocol, platform" product launched by Mysten Labs, focusing on Decentralization storage networks. The English meaning of Walrus is "walrus," and its official website emphasizes the concept of "growing strong like a walrus" and "being as adaptable as a walrus," highlighting the reliability and usability of this protocol as a storage system.

and the relationship with Sui

Walrus is built on Sui and uses Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata. However, using Walrus does not require developing applications or products on Sui. Walrus will launch an independent governance token, WAL, as a functional token instead of using SUI.

Competitive Product Comparison

Decentralization storage protocols are generally divided into two main categories:

1. Complete Copy System: Such as Filecoin and Arweave. The advantage is that there are complete files on the storage nodes, making it easy to access and migrate files even if some nodes go offline. The disadvantage is that storage costs are high and it may face Sybil attacks.

2. Reed-Solomon(RS) coding system: It splits files into small chunks, allowing decoding as long as the total size exceeds the original file. The downside is that it has high computational overhead, limiting file size and the number of participating nodes, and the process of replacing nodes is complex.

Challenges Faced by Storage

Existing decentralized storage systems still face two main challenges:

1. A continuous challenge mechanism is needed to ensure that nodes retain data, which limits the scalability of the system.
2. Storage nodes need to coordinate, understanding system participants, file payment situations, incentive mechanisms, etc., which has led to the introduction of custom blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

Core Innovation

Walrus can quickly and robustly encode data into small shards using innovative erasure coding technology, distributed across a node network. Even if two-thirds of the shards are lost, the original data can still be quickly reconstructed. This method keeps the replication factor at 4-5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, while also providing Decentralization and greater fault tolerance.

Walrus has launched RedStuff, a brand new 2D encoding algorithm specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes and combines the advantages of fast operation and high reliability. It encodes data into primary and secondary slices through simple XOR operations, distributed across storage nodes.

The main advantages of RedStuff include:

• Fast encoding/decoding speed
• Low storage overhead, scalable to hundreds of nodes
• High elasticity and fault tolerance

Walrus has also introduced an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol and an asynchronous challenge protocol to ensure the continuous availability and correct storage of data. Its economic model is based on staking, combined with reward and penalty mechanisms, and the innovative storage certification mechanism scales logarithmically with the number of stored files, reducing the cost of proving file storage.

Potential Airdrop

Walrus will launch an independent token WAL for functions such as staking and governance. Holding SUI may be a way to receive the WAL airdrop. Walrus is about to launch its 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.