What is Walrus?

Walrus is a decentralized, blockchain-agnostic storage and data availability protocol built by Mysten Labs. Using Sui as a coordination layer, Walrus efficiently manages data and provides the essential infrastructure needed for a truly decentralized web.

To help onboard the next billion users to Web3, Mysten Labs developed essential primitives like zkLogin and sponsored transactions. Walrus continues this vision by addressing decentralized storage at scale.

Tusky simplifies the process of uploading to Walrus, acting as your decentralized, privacy-first Dropbox. Whether you're uploading NFTs, website assets, or other digital content, Tusky offers a seamless solution for storing your data on Walrus.

Why did Mysten Labs build Walrus?

Storing data on-chain is expensive and challenging at scale. Even Sui, with its advanced storage fund mechanism designed to handle on-chain data, faces limitations.

Sui requires each validator to replicate the entire dataset, resulting in approximately 100 data replicas on the Sui blockchain. While this redundancy is crucial for smart contracts and on-chain computing, it's not necessary for unstructured data blobs.

That's where Walrus comes in: a more efficient and cost-effective solution for storing exabytes of unstructured data blobs.

Walrus combines the best of both worlds: onchain data auditability with off-chain scalability.

How does Walrus work?

When data is uploaded to Walrus, it is split into slivers and distributed across hundreds of globally decentralized nodes, with the entire network maintaining 4–5 copies of your data. This high redundancy ensures your data remains safe and accessible, even if one-third of the network fails or is compromised.

Walrus is unique in a number of ways. The first is its method of encoding data, a protocol called Red Stuff. This protocol builds on RS encoding used by storage solutions like Sia and Storj, but overcomes their inefficient means of recovering the slivers of data. 

Walrus uses one of, if not, the most performant blockchain in web3, Sui, as a coordination layer for managing nodes, settling payments and proving data availability. 

Its efficient architecture minimizes costs as each data blob is transmitted only once over the network. Data availability can also be certified without having to download the full blob. These storage proofs scale logarithmically with the number of stored files.

Walrus uses an economic model based on delegated proof of staking and the $WAL token, with rewards and penalties to align incentives and ensure good behaviour among nodes. The system includes a pricing mechanism for storage resources and write operations, complemented by a token governance model.

Why choose Walrus?

Coordinated by Sui

Sui blockchain boasts a 400 millisecond time to finality and over 100k TPS, making it arguably the fastest blockchain in crypto. Unlike other high performance blokchains like Solana, it has not suffered serious outages. As the backbone to Walrus, Sui enables a highly performant coordination layer for critical functions around node management and payments. 

Secure and resilient

Decentralized systems like Walrus are very resilient to compromise. When storing data on a centralized provider, your data is vulnerable to breaches through that single point of failure.

With Walrus, your data will be encoded and shared across hundreds of nodes in a global network. Even if one third of those nodes fail or are acting maliciously, you will be able to recover your data.

Cost-efficient redundancy

Walrus offers redundancy of 4-5x copies of your data on its network. Again, this does not mean it is stored in 4-5 locations. Instead, it’s split and stored in shards across hundreds of nodes.

Blockchain storage solutions like Arweave that require full replication of the data set across every node have a minimum storage overhead of at least 25x. This excessive redundancy hinders performance and is not cost efficient. 

Walrus can provide a cheaper monthly storage cost than the main web2 storage providers. 

Provable data availability

Walrus's use of Sui brings an unparalleled level of transparency allowing anyone to audit Walrus. Using your blob ID, you can check the Sui Explorer to verify if your data is being correctly stored and maintained.

Walrus is unique in that it can provide daily Proof of Availability (PoA) certificates, that prove your data is correctly stored on the network. This is in contrast to other blockchain storage solutions that cannot easily and transparently prove that data is still stored by nodes. 

How does Walrus compare to AWS S3?

Walrus outperforms AWS S3 in several areas.

Walrus is more resilient. Users retain control of their encryption keys, ensuring data integrity even if some nodes are compromised. Due to its centralized architecture, AWS can suffer breaches that can compromise your data.

Walrus is more distributed.​​ Walrus maintains 4-5 copies of your data across hundreds of nodes, providing an extremely high level of redundancy. AWS typically stores your data in a single data center; if you'd like more copies, you'll incur additional costs.

Walrus is more cost-effective. Achieving similar levels of replication on AWS would be three times more expensive than using Walrus.

Walrus use cases

Here are a few use cases, but by no means an exhaustive list of possibilities.

Decentralized Dropbox. Traditional services like Dropbox are convenient but have two significant drawbacks: centralization and a lack of privacy. With Tusky, your data is stored across Walrus's decentralized global network, and private data is end-to-end encrypted where you control the keys.

NFT projects. While IPFS has its merits, Walrus takes it further. Your NFT project’s assets can be audited and verified for proper storage. NFT assets can have their storage paid for by future owners if the current storage period is running low, which ensures the URI in the metadata for the NFT stays correct. Walrus is in testnet right now, but once in mainnet we believe it will quickly become the de facto solution for storing NFT assets.

Websites. Walrus supports all essential resources like JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and other media files, allowing you to upload and host fully decentralized websites through Tusky. This ensures your site is resilient, secure, and free from centralized control.

Multi-media assets. Designed for large blob storage with performance at scale, Walrus will be an ideal choice for businesses looking for decentralized storage for the media assets. Decrypt have already announced they will be storing all their articles, images and video content on Walrus, and we anticipate many more similar media outlets to follow. 

L1s and L2s. Blockchains can leverage Walrus to store their full histories as it offers a cost-effective solution for storing blockchain data, ensuring it remains accessible and secure. By utilizing Sui’s technology, Walrus provides checkpoints that allow for easy auditability, ensuring that blockchain histories are correctly stored and verifiable.

Get started

If you want to use Tusky as your own decentralized and completely private Dropbox, then try our app. You don't need any tokens or even a Sui wallet to get started.