Sui ecosystem welcomes a new decentralized storage solution Walrus

The decentralized storage network Walrus, recently launched by Mysten Labs, has attracted industry attention. As an important component of the Sui ecosystem, Walrus employs innovative technology aimed at addressing the challenges faced by existing decentralized storage.

Background Overview

Walrus is developed by Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, and is positioned as a Decentralization storage network. Although the project is built on Sui, it does not require users to develop applications on Sui. Walrus will issue an independent governance token, WAL.

In the field of Decentralization storage, existing solutions are mainly divided into two categories: completely replicated systems and systems using Reed-Solomon coding. The former, such as Filecoin and Arweave, has the advantage of complete files being available on storage nodes, but it comes with high storage overhead and potential risks of Sybil attacks. The latter reduces storage overhead, but the encoding and decoding processes are computationally intensive, limiting the file size and the number of participating nodes.

In addition, the existing system also faces ongoing challenges such as verifying and coordinating storage nodes, all of which limit the scalability of the system.

Core Innovations of Walrus

The core innovation of Walrus lies in its use of the RedStuff encoding algorithm. This is a 2D encoding algorithm specifically designed for Byzantine fault tolerance, combining the advantages of fountain codes.

RedStuff encodes data into primary and secondary shards through simple XOR operations, which are distributed and stored in a node network. It employs recovery thresholds of different dimensions to achieve asynchronous writing and storage proof, while keeping the total replication factor below 5 times.

Compared to Reed-Solomon coding, RedStuff has a faster encoding and decoding speed, and lower storage overhead. The system can scale to hundreds of nodes and has high resilience and fault tolerance.

Walrus also introduced an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol and an asynchronous challenge protocol to address node attrition and validate data storage. Its economic model is based on staking, combined with reward and penalty mechanisms, where the cost of storage certification expands logarithmically with the number of files.

Future Outlook

Walrus is expected to launch a testnet, with the mainnet launch date to be determined. The project will issue an independent token WAL, which will be used for staking and governance functions. Although the specific airdrop plan has not yet been announced, holding SUI may be a way to obtain WAL.

Overall, Walrus, with the advantages of the RedStuff protocol and Sui as the control layer, brings new possibilities to the field of Decentralization storage. It offers a scalable, highly resilient, and economically viable solution that aims to achieve Decentralization and broader fault tolerance while maintaining a low replication factor.