Walrus emphasizes "plug and play" in its promotion — in theory, a few lines of code in a dApp can connect to end-to-end verifiable storage. Flatlander's demo is truly impressive: videos are directly registered as Sui Blobs, with zero server dependency on the frontend, referencing directly. Many hail this as a milestone for Web3 social.

However, reality is often more sobering than slides.

Developers who have integrated it generally report that the Walrus SDK doesn't perform well in real environments. Common issues include: memory explosion during large file uploads (over 50MB) at the encoding layer; even slight network jitter causes shard broadcasting to break, and the system doesn't automatically retry; Blob creation appears successful in name, but nodes fail to distribute it promptly, leading to frontend timeouts when fetching.

Even more problematic is troubleshooting. You often don't know whether the payment layer failed, nodes refused service, or the Sui state isn't synchronized. System logs only output generic error codes, requiring manual comparison of Sui Explorer and node logs, which can take several hours.

There are also hidden pitfalls in the underlying architecture. Sui's Object model requires each Blob to occupy an Object slot, with a default maximum of 10,000 per address. In high-frequency publishing scenarios (like AI content bots), this limit is reached in just a few days, forcing the use of multiple wallets or proxy contracts, which significantly increases architectural complexity.

Although the Flatlander team has launched the feature, the video function remains labeled "Beta" and is limited to 30 seconds. The official also admits: "To experience the full functionality, a mature node network is a prerequisite. We are still optimizing."

The so-called "seamless" experience fundamentally shifts complexity from the platform to developers. When infrastructure forces applications to handle retries, revenue sharing, and degradation themselves, "seamless" becomes just a marketing term.

Walrus has indeed made breakthroughs in data authenticity, but the lesson of engineering usability has yet to be learned. In the software world, it's often the latter that determines your survival.