In the rapidly evolving world of blockchain and web3, efficient, secure, and decentralized data storage remains a critical challenge. Today, we introduce Walrus—a next-generation decentralized storage and data availability protocol designed specifically for blockchain applications and autonomous agents. Built by Mysten Labs and powered by the Sui Network, Walrus is now available as a developer preview, offering Sui builders an early opportunity to explore its capabilities and provide valuable feedback.
Walrus leverages cutting-edge innovations in erasure coding to transform large, unstructured data blobs into smaller, distributed slivers stored across a network of decentralized nodes. This approach enables rapid reconstruction of original data—even if up to two-thirds of the slivers are lost—while maintaining a minimal replication factor of just 4x–5x. That’s comparable to centralized cloud services, but with the added resilience, transparency, and ownership benefits of decentralization.
The Replication Challenge in Modern Blockchains
Blockchains like Sui have made significant strides in on-chain storage management. Features such as the storage fund ensure long-term sustainability for storing data directly on-chain. However, current architectures require full data replication across all validators—a process that results in a replication factor exceeding 100x on today’s Sui mainnet.
While this level of redundancy is essential for state replication and smart contract execution, it becomes highly inefficient when dealing with large volumes of unstructured data—such as videos, audio files, game assets, or historical blockchain records. Storing such data using traditional validator-based replication is prohibitively expensive and resource-intensive.
👉 Discover how decentralized storage can reduce costs while increasing reliability.
Introducing Walrus: Efficient, Scalable, and Resilient
Walrus addresses this inefficiency head-on by introducing a purpose-built decentralized storage layer optimized for high-availability blob storage. With Walrus, developers gain access to a system that combines low cost, robust fault tolerance, and seamless integration with the Sui ecosystem.
Key Benefits of Walrus
Cost-Effective Blob Storage at Scale
Walrus minimizes network and storage overhead by transmitting each data blob only once and distributing encoded fragments across nodes. Each node stores only a fraction of the total data, meaning per-node resource usage decreases as the network grows. This scalability allows developers to upload gigabytes of data at minimal cost—ideal for NFTs, dApps, AI datasets, and more.
High Availability and Fault Tolerance
Data stored on Walrus remains recoverable even if two-thirds of storage nodes fail or are compromised. This resilience surpasses most centralized systems and ensures continuous availability under adverse conditions. Additionally, data availability can be cryptographically certified without downloading the full blob, enabling lightweight verification crucial for Layer 2 solutions and rollups.
Use Cases Beyond Simple File Storage
Decentralized storage isn’t just about hosting files—it’s about redefining digital ownership and trust. Walrus enhances NFTs by ensuring users own not just metadata, but the actual media assets, eliminating risks of takedown or manipulation.
Moreover, Walrus serves as a low-cost data availability layer for rollups, where sequencers can publish transactions to Walrus and executors reconstruct them as needed. This model reduces bandwidth and storage demands while maintaining full verifiability.
Enterprises can also leverage Walrus for disaster recovery and long-term archival, benefiting from its decentralized architecture that offers superior data integrity, transparency, and resistance to single points of failure—advantages inherently absent in centralized solutions.
With horizontal scaling across hundreds or thousands of nodes, Walrus aims to deliver exabyte-scale storage at prices competitive with traditional cloud providers—all while offering higher assurance through decentralization.
Core Keywords
Decentralized storage, data availability, erasure coding, Sui Network, blockchain storage, web3 infrastructure, NFT media hosting, rollup data layer
What Can Developers Build with Walrus?
The Walrus developer preview equips builders with tools to experiment and innovate across diverse use cases:
- NFT and dApp Media Hosting: Store images, videos, game assets, and other multimedia directly on Walrus. These resources can be served via HTTP caches, enabling rich, fully decentralized dApps.
- AI Data Management: Securely store training datasets with verified provenance, model weights, and proofs of correct training. Walrus ensures AI outputs remain authentic and permanently available.
- Blockchain History Archival: Reduce costs by offloading long-term blockchain history—such as checkpoints, transaction logs, and state snapshots—to Walrus while preserving accessibility.
- Layer 2 Data Availability: Support rollup architectures by certifying that transaction data is publicly available. This includes storing validity proofs, zero-knowledge proofs, or large fraud proofs.
- Full Decentralized Web Experiences: Host complete websites—including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and media—on Walrus. This brings true decentralization to both front-end and back-end layers of web3 applications.
- Subscription-Based Content Delivery: Creators can store encrypted media on Walrus and distribute decryption keys only to paying subscribers, enabling new monetization models without relying on centralized platforms.
Note: While Walrus handles storage, encryption and access control must be managed off-chain by the application layer.
👉 Start building decentralized applications with efficient data storage today.
Getting Started with the Developer Preview
The Walrus Devnet is now live and open to all developers. It includes:
- A command-line client (available for macOS and Ubuntu)
- JSON and HTTP APIs for programmatic interaction
- An aggregator and publisher service
- A Devnet deployment of 10 storage nodes operated by Mysten Labs
All interactions on the Devnet are powered by SUI Testnet tokens, which can be obtained via the Sui Testnet Discord faucet. Comprehensive documentation is available at docs.walrus.site.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: Is Walrus part of the Sui blockchain?
A: Walrus is built by Mysten Labs and powered by the Sui Network, but it operates as a separate decentralized storage layer. It complements Sui’s on-chain storage model by providing scalable off-chain blob storage.
Q: How does erasure coding work in Walrus?
A: Erasure coding splits data into encoded fragments (slivers) distributed across nodes. Even if up to two-thirds are lost, the original data can still be reconstructed—ensuring high availability with minimal replication.
Q: Can anyone run a storage node?
A: In the current developer preview, all nodes are operated by Mysten Labs. Future updates will allow dynamic participation from external operators.
Q: Does Walrus support encryption?
A: Walrus stores data as-is. Encryption must be handled externally by the application before upload to ensure privacy and access control.
Q: How is data availability verified?
A: Walrus enables cryptographic certification of data availability without requiring full downloads—ideal for rollups and light clients needing efficient verification.
Q: What makes Walrus different from IPFS or Arweave?
A: Unlike IPFS (content-addressed but not guaranteed available) or Arweave (permaweb with high upfront cost), Walrus offers provable availability, low-cost storage, seamless integration with Sui, and efficient verification mechanisms tailored for blockchain use cases.
The Road Ahead
This developer preview marks the beginning of Walrus’s journey. Future releases will introduce dynamic node management, adaptive sliver mapping, expanded APIs, and enhanced tooling—all shaped by community feedback.
We’re excited to see how developers will push the boundaries of what’s possible with decentralized storage. From immersive dApps to AI-powered protocols and resilient enterprise systems, Walrus aims to become the foundational data layer for the next generation of web3 innovation.
👉 Explore how next-gen storage solutions are shaping the future of web3.
And yes—this blog post, along with walrus.site and its documentation, is hosted entirely on Walrus itself. Welcome to the decentralized web, reimagined.