Decentralized storage has been constantly torn between efficiency and cost. The recently popular Walrus protocol has challenged some traditional schemes using erasure coding technology.

Simply put, old schemes rely on "pile hard drives"—making multiple complete copies of data across all nodes in the network. To ensure data isn't lost, some protocols even replicate data 20 or 30 times, meaning storing 1TB of data actually consumes 20TB of hard drive space. This is somewhat inefficient.

Walrus's approach is different. It slices the original data into pieces, encodes them, and distributes the storage across nodes worldwide. The clever part is—restoring data doesn't require collecting all fragments. Only 25% of the total fragments are needed. As a result, the redundancy requirement drops from over ten times to about 4-5 times, reducing hardware costs by roughly 75%.

Even more impressive, the Byzantine fault tolerance remains intact. Even if some nodes go offline or act maliciously, data can still be fully recovered. This elegant mathematical design strikes a balance between security and economy.

This shift in cost structure is significant. For developers and enterprises, decentralized storage now has the opportunity to compete with centralized giants like AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage on cost.