Many people immediately categorize Walrus under "decentralized storage," as its name and sector labels tend to lead to that understanding. However, when viewed within the complete Sui ecosystem, this conclusion is actually problematic.

Walrus is more like a "data consensus layer" within the Sui ecosystem, rather than a simple tool for "where to store files."

Sui's design itself is quite aggressive—high concurrency, object model, resource-oriented. This directly prioritizes on-chain execution efficiency. But it also introduces new challenges: not all data should be written to the chain frequently. Large, rapidly changing data that must be trusted can become a bottleneck if not handled properly.

Walrus's entry point lies at this contradiction. It doesn't attempt to replace the chain's consensus mechanism but instead enables the chain to establish verifiable trust relationships for "off-chain data." In simple terms, the chain doesn't need to store the data itself but still needs to judge whether the data you bring is reliable. If this approach works, data shifts from being a burden to a manageable, schedulable resource.

Therefore, understanding Walrus as a "storage protocol" indeed misses a dimension. Essentially, it adds a long-missing capability to Sui: as application complexity increases, the system can still maintain consistency and trustworthy boundaries without being forced to choose between performance and security.

The value of WAL becomes more concrete. It doesn't depend on whether ordinary users can perceive it directly but on whether developers rely on it in critical logic paths. Once this dependency is established, Walrus naturally sinks to the bottom of the system—stable, unobtrusive, but difficult to replace.