Tusky (formerly Akord) is moving to Walrus!

We are thrilled to announce the next evolution of Tusky (formerly Akord) – our protocol, app, API, SDK and CLI will leverage Walrus, a cutting-edge decentralized storage protocol built on Sui.

Our journey has always been about empowering users with data ownership. After years of building and experience, we’ve learned that while permanent onchain storage offers some powerful use cases, a more versatile and cost-effective solution is needed for mass adoption of decentralized storage.

Walrus is that solution.

Why Walrus?

In June of this year, Walrus protocol was announced by Mysten Labs, the team behind the Sui blockchain. Walrus is designed with efficiency and scalability at its core, addressing many of the challenges with previous attempts at decentralized storage.

Here are the key reasons why we’ve chosen Walrus for our future.

Sui coordination. Walrus leverages the Sui blockchain for key operations such as purchasing storage resources on Sui that are mapped to data on nodes, management of nodes, payments, and proving data availability.

High availability and robustness. You can recover data even if one-third of the storage nodes fail or act maliciously. Data recovery is also possible if two-thirds of the slivers (the small pieces of data your binary files are split into and distributed across the network) are not retrieved.

Fast and efficient data retrieval. Walrus uses a novel erasure coding technique called Red Stuff, which is more efficient than traditional methods like Reed-Solomon (RS) encoding. This means faster data retrieval and more efficient use of storage resources.

Cost-effective. Prices will be similar to web2 services and the ability to remove data from the network and regain remaining storage resources means publishers on Walrus, like Tusky, can build decentralized Dropbox-like business models, where users pay for storage with a subscription and by deleting data they can regain storage space.

Provable data availability. Availability of data can be certified at any point on Sui without downloading the full file, providing strong guarantees when data is stored over long periods of time.

What to expect with Tusky on Walrus

We’ve built Tusky on Walrus to provide a superior experience for all of our users — whether you’re a developer, an enterprise, or an individual user.

Here are some of the things you can expect on launch, during testnet and going into mainnet.

Cost

When Tusky launches on Walrus testnet, 1 TB of storage will cost as little as $12 per month with annual billing (subscribers’ data will be automatically migrated to mainnet). This brings the cost of data storage in league with popular web2 services, allowing users to get the superpowers of web3 without having to sacrifice on storage capacity or cost.

Long-term storage

On Walrus you can store assets for up to 2 years, and in the future we’ll be exploring how to offer even longer-term storage by enabling storage resources to be extended indefinitely. During testnet we’ll be working on the API to allow for creation of Epoch Vaults, where you will be able to specify for how long each binary is stored for and pay upfront for that storage. This feature will then come to the app.

Tokenization

A core component of data ownership is the ability to monetize your data. We’ve had minting in Tusky since 2023 and have been developing token-gated access to vaults for some time. We’ll be moving minting and token gated access over to work on the Sui blockchain. Tusky users will be able to effortlessly mint to the Sui blockchain, with assets on Walrus, and use those tokens to gate access into their private vaults on Tusky.

Website and dApp publishing

Using Tusky and Walrus, users will be able to host fully decentralized web experiences, storing and serving all resources — js, css, html, media, etc — providing not only content storage, but also hosting the UX of dApps and websites. With SuiNS, websites can have human readable names and the Walrus docs already demo how a dapp on Walrus minting an NFT collection can also host a separate web page for each NFT in the collection.

Quantum resistant end-to-end encryption

We’ll be levelling up our end-to-end encryption, leveraging the latest cryptographic techniques to achieve quantum resistance.

Developer tooling

We’ll be applying the same passion we have for user experience to developers wishing to build on Walrus with Tusky's vault protocol or API. Our developer tools will include the following.

• A fast, reliable, edge optimised API that takes care of file management, encryption, access control, and handling Sui wallet and tokens. This will be available in the coming days.
• An open-source SDK coming during Walrus testnet, with the Tusky protocol in Sui smart contracts coming later.
• A command-line interface (CLI) coming soon.

These tools will make it easy for developers to integrate Walrus’s decentralized storage capabilities into their own applications.

Let’s go! How do I get started?

We’re excited to offer our early adopters 50% off on their first 6 months.

For subscribers, all data stored during testnet will be automatically migrated to mainnet once we launch.

• Try the new app. Our app is designed to give you the familiar web3 Dropbox-like experience but with all the benefits of decentralized storage. Try the new app here.
• Explore the API: Businesses and developers looking to leverage Walrus can start exploring our fast, reliable, edge-optimized API. Check out the API here.

To our community

To our loyal community, we want to say thank you. Your support and trust have been instrumental in helping us grow and evolve. To show our appreciation, we’ll be offering exclusive perks and future offers to any users who made a purchase on Akord.

Our mission remains the same: to empower users with true data ownership. Walrus enables us to scale that mission, providing the flexibility, performance, and cost-effectiveness needed for decentralized storage to reach the mainstream. We’ll be sharing more updates and resources in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Thank you for being part of our journey, and we can’t wait to continue this next chapter with you.