Sui Officially Launches Decentralization Storage New Solution Walrus Interpretation

The decentralized storage network Arweave has successfully realized the return of AR coin price, ecosystem, and popularity by launching the computing layer AO. Meanwhile, Sui, as a general-purpose computing chain, has launched the decentralized storage network Walrus, which will also create a new wave in this field.

Background Introduction

Team

The development company behind Sui is Mysten Labs, most of whose founders and employees come from Meta('s former Facebook) dissolved blockchain project Diem.

Walrus is the latest product classified as "protocol, platform" by Mysten Labs, and it is a Decentralization storage network. The English meaning of Walrus is "walrus," and its official website uses slogans like "thrive like a walrus" and "adapt like a walrus," reflecting the reliability and availability of the protocol as a storage system.

and the relationship with Sui

Walrus is built on Sui and utilizes Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata. However, using Walrus does not require building applications or products on Sui. Walrus will launch a new governance token, WAL, as a functional token instead of using SUI.

Competitive Product Comparison

Decentralization storage protocols are typically divided into two main categories:

1. Full Copy System: Represents Filecoin and Arweave. The advantage is that there are complete files on the storage nodes, so files can be easily accessed and migrated even if a node goes offline. The disadvantage is that storage costs are high and it may face witch attacks.

2. Using a system encoded with Reed-Solomon(RS): The file is divided into small pieces, and as long as the total size exceeds the original file, it can be decoded. The downside is that the computational overhead is significant, which limits the file size and the number of participating nodes, and the process of replacing nodes is complex.

Challenges faced by storage

Existing decentralized storage systems face two main challenges:

1. A continuous challenge mechanism is needed to ensure that nodes retain data, which affects system scalability.
2. Storage nodes need to coordinate, understand system participants, file payment situations, implement incentive mechanisms, etc., leading to the need for a customized blockchain and the introduction of cryptocurrency.

Core Innovation

Walrus, by adopting innovative erasure coding technology, can quickly and robustly encode unstructured data blocks into small shards, distributed across a node network. Even if two-thirds of the shards are lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed using a portion of the shards. This results in a replication factor of only 4-5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, while also providing the advantages of Decentralization and greater fault tolerance.

Specific innovations include:

1. RedStuff: A new type of 2D coding algorithm designed for Byzantine fault tolerance, based on fountain codes, combining rapid operations and high reliability.

2. Asynchronous Storage Proof: Achieved for the first time through 2D coding, with a total replication factor of less than 5 times.

3. Efficient Committee Reconfiguration Protocol: Addressing the natural attrition of storage nodes to ensure continuous data availability.

4. Asynchronous Challenge Protocol: Verify whether the validator nodes correctly store the data, with costs expanding logarithmically with the number of stored files.

5. Staking-based economic model: combining reward and punishment mechanisms.

Walrus, centered around the RedStuff protocol, provides a scalable, resilient, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution. Sui, as the control layer, offers Walrus a scalable, programmable, and secure infrastructure, allowing it to focus on addressing the core issues of Decentralization storage.

Potential Airdrop

Walrus will launch an independent token WAL, which will be used for staking, governance, and other functions. Referring to the experiences of similar projects, holding SUI may be a way to receive WAL airdrops.

Walrus is expected to launch its testnet soon, with the mainnet launch date to be determined. Currently, users can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy their own websites.