Analysis of the New Decentralization Storage Solution Walrus in the Sui Ecosystem

After the decentralized storage network Arweave launched its computing layer AO, it successfully stimulated the price, ecosystem, and popularity of AR. As a general-purpose computing chain, Sui's launch of the decentralized storage network Walrus will also create new waves in this field.

Background Introduction

Team

Walrus is the latest product from Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, classified as "protocol, platform," and is a Decentralization storage network. Most of the founders and employees of Mysten Labs come from the now-defunct blockchain project Diem at Meta (formerly Facebook).

The English original meaning of Walrus is "walrus". Its official website uses slogans such as "growing like a walrus" and "adaptable like a walrus" to convey the reliability and availability of the protocol as a storage system.

and the relationship with Sui

Walrus is built on Sui and utilizes Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata. However, using Walrus does not require building applications or products on Sui. Walrus will launch a brand new governance token, WAL, as a functional token, rather than using SUI.

Competitor Comparison

Decentralization storage protocols are generally divided into two main categories: fully replicated systems and systems using Reed-Solomon (RS) coding. Representatives of fully replicated systems include Filecoin and Arweave, which have the advantage of complete file availability on storage nodes, but there are issues such as high storage overhead and the potential for Sybil attacks. RS coding systems divide files into smaller chunks, but there are problems such as high computational overhead for encoding and decoding processes and limited degrees of decentralization.

The challenges faced in storage

Regardless of the replication protocol used, existing decentralized storage systems face two main challenges:

1. Continuous challenges are needed to ensure that storage nodes retain data and do not discard it, which limits the scalability of the system.

2. Storage nodes need to coordinate, including managing system members, file storage costs, implementing participation incentive mechanisms, etc. This is why many systems have implemented custom blockchains.

Core Innovation

Walrus can quickly and robustly encode unstructured data blocks into smaller shards using innovative erasure coding technology, and distribute them across a network of storage nodes. Even if up to two-thirds of the shards are lost, the original data can be quickly reconstructed using partial shards. This method results in a replication factor of only 4 to 5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, while also providing the advantages of Decentralization and greater fault tolerance.

Walrus has launched RedStuff, a new 2D encoding algorithm designed specifically for Byzantine Fault Tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes, combining the advantages of fast operations and high reliability. It encodes data into primary slices and secondary slices through simple XOR operations and distributes these slices across storage nodes.

The advantages of RedStuff include:

• Compared to RS coding, using simple XOR operations makes the encoding/decoding speed faster.
• Due to low storage overhead, the system can scale to hundreds of nodes.
• High elasticity and fault tolerance, ensuring data recovery even in the case of Byzantine faults.

Walrus is also equipped with an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to address the natural attrition of storage nodes, ensuring the continuous availability of data. RedStuff's 2D encoding makes state migration more efficient, allowing other nodes to recover lost slices even if some nodes are unavailable.

In addition, Walrus introduces an asynchronous challenge protocol for verifying whether nodes correctly store data. This protocol allows for efficient storage proofs, ensuring data availability without relying on network assumptions, and its cost scales logarithmically with the number of stored files.

The economic model of Walrus is based on staking, combined with reward and penalty mechanisms. The innovative storage certification mechanism expands logarithmically with the number of stored files, reducing the cost of proving file storage.

Overall, Walrus, centered around the RedStuff protocol, offers a scalable, resilient, and economically viable Decentralization storage solution that can provide high authenticity, integrity, auditability, and availability at a reasonable cost. All of this is made possible by Sui, which serves as the control layer for Walrus, providing a scalable, programmable, and secure infrastructure.

Future Outlook

Walrus will launch an independent token WAL, which includes functions such as staking and governance. Currently, Walrus is expected to launch a testnet soon, with the mainnet launch time to be determined. Interested developers can refer to the official documentation to learn how to use Walrus to deploy their own websites.