Many people simply understand Walrus as just another storage network, but this view is too one-sided. What it is truly doing is a rare endeavor in the industry—injecting verifiable long-term memory into on-chain systems.

How frustrating is the current situation? Most Web3 projects lack the concept of long-term memory altogether. NFT images disappear, social posts become inaccessible, historical data cannot be retrieved. Even so, on-chain contracts continue to operate normally, but the value of the applications themselves has been hollowed out. Walrus aims to solve this pain point—not just "whether it can be accessed," but more importantly, "whether it can be proven to have existed."

Its approach is to record the metadata of objects on-chain, then delegate the integrity verification to the protocol layer rather than a single node. This way, data is no longer bound to a gateway or a company but is collectively endorsed by the entire network.

But reality always presents challenges. Verification itself requires costs—greater verifiability inevitably means more computation, more frequent communication, and a more complex development process. Walrus prioritizes security in its engineering design, at the expense of developer friendliness.

Ultimately, Walrus is not for all projects. It is specifically built for systems that truly require the attribute of "persistent existence." It may not seem eye-catching in the short term, but in the long run, it is very likely to evolve into a fundamental infrastructure that many projects cannot do without.