The Sui ecosystem launches a new decentralized storage solution Walrus

The Sui ecosystem recently launched a decentralized storage network project called Walrus. This project is led by Mysten Labs, the development company behind Sui, whose majority of founders and employees come from Meta's former blockchain project, Diem.

Walrus is built on Sui and utilizes Sui to coordinate storage space and metadata sales, but using Walrus does not require building applications or products on Sui. Walrus will also launch an independent governance token WAL as a utility token.

In the field of decentralized storage, there are currently two main types of solutions: one is the fully replicated system, such as Filecoin and Arweave; the other uses Reed-Solomon coding. Both types of solutions have their own advantages and disadvantages. Fully replicated systems have high storage overhead and may face Sybil attacks. Reed-Solomon coding systems, on the other hand, have high computational overhead, which limits the file size and the number of nodes.

In addition, existing decentralized storage systems still face ongoing challenges such as verifying data integrity and the need for complex coordination among storage nodes, which all limit the scalability of the system.

The core innovation of Walrus lies in the adoption of a new 2D coding algorithm called RedStuff. It is based on fountain codes, combining fast operation and high reliability. Through simple XOR operations, RedStuff encodes data into primary slices and secondary slices, which are distributed across the node network. Even if 2/3 of the slices are lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed.

This design enables Walrus to achieve Decentralization and high fault tolerance with a replication factor of only 4-5 times. In contrast, other systems require over 25 times the storage overhead to achieve the same level of reliability.

The 2D encoding of RedStuff also implements asynchronous storage proof, with a total replication factor of less than 5 times. Lost slices can be recovered based on the amount of lost data, saving bandwidth. In addition, Walrus also introduces an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol and asynchronous challenge protocol, further enhancing the system's scalability and reliability.

The economic model of Walrus is based on staking, combined with reward and punishment mechanisms. Its innovative storage certification mechanism scales logarithmically with the number of stored files, significantly reducing the cost of proving file storage.

Overall, Walrus is centered around the RedStuff protocol, providing a scalable, resilient, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution. It can offer storage services with high authenticity, integrity, auditability, and availability at a reasonable cost.

Walrus is expected to launch a testnet soon, with the mainnet launch time to be determined. In the future, WAL tokens may be airdropped, and holding SUI could be a way to receive the airdrop. Currently, users can refer to the official documentation to learn how to deploy their own websites using Walrus.