TL;DR:
Founded by former Meta engineers behind the abandoned Diem project and supported by Mysten Labs, Walrus is redefining decentralized data storage.
Unlike its competitors - IPFS, Filecoin, and Arweave, Walrus offers fully programmable storage integrated with smart contracts and dynamic NFTs and facilitates real-time data usage.
Its storage process is uses advanced erasure coding - a method of data protection that breaks data into bits to store across various locations. A failsafe method that if/when data becomes corrupted; the data can be reconstructed without any limitations.
The above storage process makes the Walrus protocol more cost-efficient than competitors as it can store massive amounts for a fraction of traditional costs. Yet there is a drawback to its pricing.
A file stored on the protocol is called a “blob” - large, unstructured data files such as videos, images, audio, and even blockchain history.
Introduction
Since TGE and its launch in March 2025, Walrus, the decentralized file storage platform on Sui, has been making headlines for all the right reasons. Set to be a key player in the Web3 storage ecosystem, Walrus is rethinking how data is stored, managed, and even programmed on the blockchain. Below, we’ll compare and contrast Walrus and its competitors while showing how it could be the superior solution.
Shortcomings of Existing (Decentralized) Storage Solutions
On April 15, 2025, Binance and Kucoin services were down globally due to AWS’ outage across the Tokyo data center, leading Binance to suspend withdrawals momentarily to keep funds SAFU. This outage affected Binance, Kucoin and multiple other exchanges, with users reporting malfunctions with candlesticks, failed order cancellations, and asset transfer delays. An unpopular opinion: delete Amazon Web Services, and you’ve deleted 30% of the internet. WHY? AWS is the leading cloud service and data storage provider for both Web2 and Web3 and has since maintained its stronghold.
Source: Statista
This isn’t the first AWS outage – since its emergence in 2006, AWS has suffered 15+ major outages, excluding minor outages that don’t make the news. This recent outage highlights the risks of relying on centralized cloud infrastructure for critical financial services. Walrus Protocol offers several solutions to mitigate these risks and ensure uninterrupted access to decentralized storage and financial operations.
Unlike AWS, Walrus operates on a fully decentralized network, Sui, removing single points of failure. Additionally, Walrus uses red-stuff encoding, an erasure coding technique that splits data into smaller chunks and stores the chunks across a network of nodes. This means Walrus holds and provides access to user data and assets without interruption if part of the network goes offline. There’s also a self-healing recovery mechanism for automatically reconstructing lost data from distributed backups by the system during network downtime.
Now, let’s narrow it down to the pioneers of decentralized storage, their shortcomings, and Walrus’ solutions. These pioneers laid the groundwork for what we have today while highlighting areas of improvement in security, scalability, accessibility, and performance. Take IPFS, for starters. It introduced content-addressable storage but had issues scaling and adequately handling large datasets while relying heavily on active miner nodes. Filecoin, on the other hand, was built on IPFS and encountered latency issues, high transaction fees, and network congestion during peak usage. Arweave comes with limited flexibility in data management, challenges in incentivizing miners, and high storage costs because it uses network-wide replication to store data.
Walrus’ Answer to the Bottlenecks
Walrus’ solution combines cost efficiency, scalability, and programmability to overcome its predecessors’ limitations. Let’s take it one by one below.
Cost efficiency: The bottom line is that Walrus costs less than Arweave, Filecoin, and others as a protocol and pricing method for users. One important thing to note is that you’ll pay less on Arweave to store your files in the long run. For context, Walrus charges $50/TB per annum with the subsidized cost package and $250/TB per month without it. Our focus is on the unsubsidized Walrus package. Arweave charges a one-time fee of $9,747/TB for permanent storage, and in 3+ years, unsubsidized Walrus prices catch up. After that, Walrus price balloons and keeps rising, e.g., after breaking even in 3 years, the user will pay $15,000/TB every five years. Compared to subsidized storage, it will take about 195 years for Arweave to become cheaper. Another important fact to note is that the subsidized price is not easily accessible and is mostly reserved for developers and projects building on Walrus or the Sui blockchain.
Replication factor: Walrus possesses a 4 to 5 times replication ability. Compare this to Arweave’s network-wide replication, which was reported to be 500 times more expensive. On the other hand, Filecoin’s replication factor (2x–10x) is comparable to Walrus’s (4x–5x), but Filecoin’s costs are typically higher due to miner overhead and incentives.
Lower overhead: Filecoin’s dynamic model is complex and costly when high amounts of replication are required with operational overhead stemming from storage deals, miner incentives, and verifying proofs like Proof-of-Replication and Proof-of-Spacetime. Arweave’s high replication cost introduces significant operational overhead for miners maintaining numerous data copies across the blockweave, increasing initial costs but ensuring permanence. IPFS has low operational overhead but still requires IPFS Cluster or Filecoin integration for reliable replication. Walrus’s streamlined approach cuts operational complexity and unnecessary expenses like a hot knife through butter.
Flexibility in Data Management: Walrus uses self-healing recovery mechanisms and authenticated data structures, ensuring uninterrupted availability and consistency. This mechanism tackles Arweave's rigidity and Filecoin's latency issues.
Scalability: Walrus leverages Sui for enhanced scalability, addressing IPFS's and Filecoin's challenges with managing large-scale data.
Programmability: Unlike static storage protocols, Walrus integrates with smart contracts, enabling dynamic NFTs and real-time data interaction. This addresses the other’s limitations in handling programmable storage.
Programmable data: Storage That’s Alive
Existing decentralized storage protocols treat data as static and unchangeable. Walrus transforms data from static blobs to dynamic, programmable assets. Two things: Walrus is integrated with Sui blockchain and can directly interact with Sui smart contracts. This unique advantage provides more utility than the run-of-the-mill “store your data securely” mantra users are familiar with. We are talking dynamic, fully on-chain NFTs and assets that don’t need off-chain metadata storage. We’re also talking about easy access to data, management, modification, and transfer of assets using Sui contracts. To top it off, Walrus’s architecture is versatile enough to support cross-chain use cases, ensuring broader applicability.
$WAL Airdrop, Tokenomics, and Utility
$WAL is Walrus ecosystem’s token, and before TGE, Walrus raised $140M led by Standard Crypto. WAL was Sui’s largest airdrop to date. Here’s how WAL tokens were distributed:
Over 60% of WAL tokens were distributed to the community - airdrops, grants, developer support, incentives, and storage subsidies.
10% Walrus User Drop – Airdropped to early adopters and earmarked for future distributions
43% Community Reserve – For grants, dev support, incentive programs, and other ecosystem initiatives
30% Core Contributors – For early builders who contributed to Walrus
10% Subsidies – For supporting storage nodes as the fee base grows (the subsidized cost aforementioned)
7% Investors – For investors who participated in the fundraise
WAL is the payment token for storage on the Walrus protocol, with the payment mechanism designed to keep storage costs stable in fiat terms and protect against long-term fluctuations in the WAL token price. When users pay for storage, they pay to have data stored for a fixed amount of time, and the WAL paid upfront is distributed across time to storage nodes and stakers as compensation for their services. The WAL token distribution includes a 10% allocation for subsidies. These subsidies will allow users to access storage at a lower rate than the current market price while ensuring that storage nodes stay profitable.
Regarding security, users can choose to stake their tokens for network security whether they use storage services or run nodes. The nodes have to attract their stakes, which affects how much data is assigned to them. Both nodes & $WAL stakers are entitled to rewards. As for governance, $WAL stakers and holders have a say on system parameters (pricing, storage amounts). Nodes determine the level of various penalties, with votes equivalent to their respective WAL stakes.
Concluding Words
With its innovative approach, backed by Mysten Labs’ visionary team, Walrus empowers developers to create cutting-edge Web3 dapps and allows for enterprise-ready data management. As Mysten Labs’ co-founder George Danezis notes, “Walrus is pivotal for blockchain projects needing rich media support,” making decentralized storage accessible and practical for all. At the end of the day, choosing which storage option to use is up to you, the user. That said, the future of decentralized storage is bright!int towards Sui's bold and broad ambition of onboarding more users and adopting newer, beneficial use cases.
