Decentralized storage has experienced numerous reshuffles in recent years. Projects like Arweave, Filecoin, and Walrus have become mainstream in the market, but by 2026, the situation has changed. Walrus, supported by the high-performance Sui ecosystem, leads comprehensively in technical efficiency, economic design, and practical application implementation, and has become the new choice for investors and developers.

From a technical perspective, the differences are quite clear. Arweave emphasizes the concept of one-time payment for permanent storage, but high redundancy backups result in elevated storage costs; Filecoin relies on miner incentives to drive large data transactions, but the problem is that the game between nodes is too complex, and data retrieval efficiency is not ideal. Walrus uses the Red Stuff erasure coding scheme, which only requires a 4 to 5 times replication factor to achieve high availability, directly reducing costs to one-fifth of Arweave’s and one-third of Filecoin’s. More importantly, Walrus focuses on blob large object storage, with native integration into Sui’s high concurrency contracts, supporting direct data programming interactions—something Arweave and Filecoin cannot do at all, making it especially friendly for scenarios requiring large datasets on-chain and real-time calls in the AI era.

In terms of economic model, the $WAL token is indeed more sustainable. AR mainly relies on early donation funds, with sluggish market demand growth; FIL is heavily affected by miner selling pressure and mining volatility. WAL is different; it directly links token demand with actual storage consumption—each time blob data is uploaded, WAL is consumed. The Storage Fund’s intelligent subsidy mechanism ensures a long-term economic cycle, forming a healthier incentive model. This design gives ecosystem participants a stronger willingness to hold tokens and provides a more solid foundation for market valuation.