Walrus

Walrus is a decentralized blob storage and data-availability protocol designed to store large, unstructured files (images, video, datasets, model artifacts) across a distributed network of storage nodes. It’s positioned as infrastructure for “data markets” and AI-era applications, where data needs to be durable, verifiable, and accessible without relying on a single centralized provider.

Walrus combines three main directions under one umbrella:

• Decentralized storage for large files (blobs): an interface for writing and reading big objects, with mechanisms to track a blob’s availability and storage lifetime. Apps can store content, extend retention, and integrate stored blobs into on-chain and off-chain workflows.

• Resilient, cost-efficient encoding model: instead of fully replicating files, Walrus uses erasure coding-splitting data into many fragments distributed across nodes-so the original blob can be reconstructed from a subset of fragments. This improves fault tolerance while keeping storage overhead closer to practical cloud economics.

• Network coordination, incentives, and operations: storage nodes participate in a committee-style operation across epochs, with a delegated staking and payment model. A native token (often referenced as WAL) is used for delegation/incentives and for paying for storage capacity.

Key features typically highlighted by Walrus include verifiable storage/retrievability assumptions, strong availability under node failures, developer-friendly access methods (CLI/SDK/HTTP-style integrations), and tooling aimed at hosting content (including static sites) and supporting access-controlled data sharing.

Overall, Walrus positions itself as a Web3-native storage layer optimized for large data, where durability and retrieval are achieved through distributed encoding and economically incentivized node operators.