New Member of the Sui Ecosystem Walrus: An Innovative Solution for Decentralization Storage

After the launch of the computing layer AO by the decentralized storage network Arweave, it successfully drove the development of its ecosystem and the rise in coin prices. The general-purpose computing chain Sui has also launched its own decentralized storage network Walrus. What changes will this new member bring to the Sui ecosystem?

Background Introduction

Team

Walrus is the latest product launched by Mysten Labs, the development company behind Sui, classified as "protocol, platform". Most of the founders and employees of Mysten Labs come from Meta('s previously dissolved blockchain project Diem at Facebook). The name Walrus is derived from "walrus", and its official website emphasizes "growing strong like a walrus" and "adapting powerfully like a walrus", highlighting its reliability and usability as a storage system.

and the relationship with Sui

Although Walrus is built on Sui and utilizes Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata, using Walrus does not require the development of applications on Sui. Walrus will introduce a separate governance token, WAL, as a utility token, instead of using SUI.

Market Competition

Decentralization storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and Reed-Solomon(RS) coding systems. Fully replicated systems like Filecoin and Arweave have the advantage of high file availability, but they face issues such as high storage costs and vulnerability to Sybil attacks. Although RS coding systems have higher storage efficiency, they face challenges such as high computational costs and complex data recovery.

Industry Challenges

Existing decentralized storage systems still face two main challenges:

1. A continuous challenge mechanism is needed to ensure that storage nodes retain data, which limits the scalability of the system.
2. Storage nodes require complex coordination mechanisms, which is also why many systems have implemented custom blockchains.

Core Innovation

How does Walrus address these challenges to bring new solutions for Decentralization storage?

Walrus adopts innovative erasure coding technology, capable of quickly and robustly encoding unstructured data blocks into small fragments, which are distributed and stored in a node network. Even if up to two-thirds of the fragments are lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed. This method keeps the replication factor at 4-5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, while maintaining Decentralization and greater fault resilience.

Specifically, Walrus has launched RedStuff, a brand new 2D coding algorithm designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes and combines the advantages of fast operation and high reliability.

RedStuff encodes data into primary and secondary slices through simple XOR operations, which are distributed across storage nodes. For encoding in different dimensions, RedStuff uses different thresholds, achieving asynchronous writing and asynchronous storage proofs while maintaining a low total replication factor.

The advantages of RedStuff include:

• Fast encoding/decoding speed
• Low storage overhead
• Strong Scalability
• High elasticity and fault tolerance

Walrus is also equipped with an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to address the natural attrition of storage nodes, ensuring the continuous availability of data. Its innovative asynchronous challenge protocol can efficiently verify whether nodes are correctly storing data, and the cost expands logarithmically with the number of stored files.

The economic model of Walrus is based on staking, combined with reward and penalty mechanisms. Its storage certification mechanism reduces the cost of storing proof documents.

Overall, Walrus is centered around the RedStuff protocol, providing a scalable, resilient, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution. This is all made possible by Sui as the control layer of Walrus, offering a scalable, programmable, and secure infrastructure.

Future Outlook

Walrus will launch an independent token WAL for staking, governance, and more. Currently, Walrus is preparing for the 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.

With the development of Walrus, it is expected to become an important component of the Sui ecosystem, bringing new possibilities and opportunities to the field of Decentralization storage.