Decentralized storage has been dominated by solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, but Walrus Protocol opens another door. The biggest innovation of this project is—allowing data to be deleted.

This sounds simple, but it fundamentally changes the rules of the storage game. Traditional solutions pursue permanent storage, while Walrus offers flexible lifecycle management, allowing users to independently decide the retention period of their data. Built on the SUI blockchain and utilizing Move smart contracts for data availability verification, the cost control is quite aggressive—only a fraction of AWS.

The economic model is also quite interesting. The $WAL token locks in storage costs through a prepayment mechanism, completely insulating it from market fluctuations. This is very friendly for commercial applications, as nobody wants storage costs to double due to token price volatility.

The project background is strong. Founded by a former Meta crypto research team, it successfully raised $140 million in 2025, with traditional financial giants like a16z and Franklin Templeton participating. The mainnet is now live, and the node network is continuously expanding.

Use cases are expanding. DecryptMedia has already used it to store on-chain articles, and demand from media, NFT, and AI applications is flooding in. Currently, Walrus is gradually becoming an important part of Web3 data infrastructure, especially in fields that require flexible storage strategies, where the value of this protocol will become increasingly prominent.