The company behind Sui launched the decentralized storage network Walrus

Mysten Labs, the development company behind Sui, recently launched a new decentralized storage network called Walrus. This project aims to address some key challenges faced by existing decentralized storage systems.

Background Introduction

Walrus is the latest product classified as "protocol, platform" by Mysten Labs. Although Walrus is built on Sui, using it does not require developing applications or products on Sui. Walrus will launch its own governance token WAL, as an independent functional token.

Currently, decentralized storage protocols are mainly divided into two categories: fully replicated systems and systems using Reed-Solomon(RS) coding. Fully replicated systems such as Filecoin and Arweave provide high availability, but there are issues of high storage overhead and potential susceptibility to Sybil attacks. RS coding systems, while reducing storage overhead, face high computational and network transmission costs in terms of encoding, decoding, and node replacement.

In addition, existing decentralized storage systems face two main challenges: the need for ongoing challenge mechanisms to ensure data integrity, and the coordination requirements between storage nodes.

The Core Innovation of Walrus

Walrus is able to quickly and robustly encode data into small shards and distribute them across the network by adopting innovative erasure coding technology. Even if a large portion of the shards is lost, it can quickly reconstruct the original data while maintaining a low replication factor.

The core of Walrus is RedStuff, a new type of 2D coding algorithm. RedStuff is based on fountain codes, combining fast operations with high reliability. It uses simple XOR operations for coding, improving encoding/decoding speeds and allowing the system to scale to hundreds of nodes.

Walrus also introduces an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol and an asynchronous challenge protocol to ensure the continuous availability of data and the correctness of validated storage. Its economic model is based on staking, combined with reward and penalty mechanisms.

Potential Impact

Walrus, as a scalable, highly flexible, and cost-effective Decentralization storage solution, has the potential to provide significant infrastructure support for the Web3 ecosystem. Its innovative approach could drive the development of Decentralization storage technology and open up possibilities for more application scenarios.

Walrus is expected to launch a testnet, while the mainnet launch date has not yet been determined. As the project continues to develop, its impact on the Sui ecosystem and the broader blockchain industry is worth paying attention to.