Sui ecosystem welcomes new Decentralization storage solution

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully drove the return of AR coin price, ecosystem, and popularity. As a general-purpose computing chain, Sui will also launch the decentralized storage network Walrus, which will create new waves in this field.

Background Introduction

Team

Walrus is the latest decentralized storage network product launched by Mysten Labs. Most of the founders and employees of Mysten Labs come from Meta('s former Facebook) dissolved blockchain project Diem. The name Walrus comes from "walrus," and its official website emphasizes the reliability and adaptability of the storage system.

and the relationship with Sui

Although Walrus is built on Sui and utilizes Sui to coordinate storage space and metadata sales, using Walrus does not require developing applications on Sui. Walrus will issue a separate governance token, WAL, as a functional token.

Competitor Comparison

Decentralization storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories:

1. Complete replication system: Represents a well-known storage platform and a certain storage network. The advantage is high file availability, but there are issues such as high storage overhead and the possibility of witch attacks.

2. Reed-Solomon(RS) coding system: splits files into small chunks for storage, but the encoding and decoding process has high computational overhead, limiting the file size and number of nodes.

Challenges faced by storage

Existing decentralized storage systems still face two major challenges:

• A continuous challenge mechanism is needed to ensure that nodes retain data, affecting the system's scalability.
• Storage nodes require complex coordination mechanisms, leading most systems to introduce custom blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

Core Innovation

Walrus quickly encodes data into small shards and distributes storage by adopting innovative erasure coding technology. Even if most shards are lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed. This method keeps the replication factor between 4-5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, while also providing Decentralization and stronger fault tolerance.

Walrus has launched a brand new 2D coding algorithm called RedStuff, specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes, combining fast operations with high reliability. It encodes data into primary and secondary slices using simple XOR operations, distributed across storage nodes.

The main advantages of RedStuff include:

• Fast encoding and decoding speed
• Low storage overhead
• Scalable to hundreds of nodes
• Has high elasticity and fault tolerance

Walrus is also equipped with an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol that ensures data availability. Its asynchronous challenge protocol can efficiently verify node storage, with costs expanding logarithmically with the number of files.

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

Overall, Walrus provides a scalable, highly resilient, and economically viable decentralized storage solution that offers high authenticity, integrity, auditability, and availability of services at a reasonable cost.

Future Outlook

Walrus will launch an independent token WAL, which features staking, governance, and other functions. Holding SUI may be a way to obtain WAL airdrops. The Walrus testnet is about to launch, with the mainnet launch date to be determined. Currently, users can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy websites.