Walrus is a decentralized storage and data availability protocol designed to solve one of Web3’s biggest blind spots: handling large unstructured files (blobs) such as videos, images, audio, PDFs, AI datasets, and game assets. Unlike traditional cloud storage like AWS or Google Cloud, which depends on centralized servers, Walrus spreads encoded data fragments across a network of independent storage nodes, making the system resistant to outages and censorship
The secret sauce behind this efficiency is Red Stuff, a two-dimensional erasure coding algorithm that breaks files into many small encoded pieces (called slivers) and stores them across the network. This method drastically reduces storage overhead compared to full file replication while ensuring that files can still be reconstructed even if many nodes go offline. Because each blob becomes a tradable object on the Sui blockchain, developers can programmatically interact with stored data, enforce access rules, and integrate storage deep into decentralized applications something traditional storage systems can’t offer
