Decentralized storage has always faced an awkward reality—costs are too high for most ordinary users to afford. But the emergence of the Walrus protocol seems to have broken this deadlock.

How do traditional distributed storage solutions work? Taking Arweave as an example, it requires every node in the network to store a complete copy of the data. This sounds secure, but the cost of storage is prohibitively high.

Walrus takes a different approach. It uses erasure coding technology to split data into pieces and disperse them across multiple nodes, eliminating the need for each node to store the full version. Interestingly, even if one-third of the nodes suddenly go offline or are compromised, the remaining data can still be fully recovered. This ensures security while avoiding excessive redundancy—this is the smart part.

Even more clever is that the more nodes participate in the network, the less storage pressure each node faces, and the overall network efficiency improves accordingly. Costs naturally decrease.

The data is here—compared to traditional solutions, Walrus can reduce storage costs by 75% to 98.6%. What does this number mean? Massive storage needs like AI training data and 4K videos finally have an economically feasible solution.

In simple terms, Walrus, with solid engineering design, exposes the lie that "decentralization = sky-high prices." This path is now open, and the threshold for large-scale Web3 applications has truly been lowered.