Cas Abbé

Blockchains are incredible for trust, state, and computation, but they aren’t designed to handle big data.

If you try to store videos, AI models, images, PDFs, or entire app frontends directly on-chain, you hit performance limits, huge fees, and bloat that slows nodes down. That’s because blockchains replicate everything across validators, and every gigabyte added means more work for every node.

Walrus changes that.

It’s a decentralized storage and data availability protocol built on the Sui blockchain that’s specifically tailored for large, unstructured files called blobs think media, datasets, logs, and game assets and makes them verifiable, resilient, and programmable for Web3 apps. It does this in a way that’s much closer to how web apps actually use data, not just reference hashes.

What Walrus Solves?

Traditional storage options fall into two buckets

Cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud): Fast but centralized, expensive for blockchain apps, and introduces trust assumptions.

Blockchains: Verifiable but too expensive and slow for big data.

Walrus sits between these worlds. It’s not trying to put data on-chain, but it ties data to on-chain logic. Developers upload a file (a blob), then the system splits, encodes, and distributes it across many independent storage nodes. Metadata and availability proofs live on the Sui blockchain, where they can be referenced by smart contracts.

How It Works?

Blob Storage on Walrus – A developer or app uploads a large file to Walrus using the client, CLI, or SDK.

Erasure Coding – Instead of storing a file in one place, Walrus uses a 2D erasure coding scheme called Red Stuff to split data into slivers that are distributed to nodes. Even if many nodes go offline, the file can be reconstructed.

On-Chain Availability Proofs – Nodes return proofs that they are storing their slivers. These proofs are attested on the Sui blockchain, making data availability verifiable and tamper-resistant.

Incentives & economics – The native WAL token is used to pay for storage, incentivize nodes, and secure the network. This avoids centralized pricing and aligns economic incentives for reliability.

Why Builders Should Care

Scalability for Big Data: Walrus is optimized for large binary objects (“blobs”), not just key/value pairs.

Decentralized Availability: Data stays available even when individual nodes fail.

Programmability: Blobs are tied to on-chain objects and smart contracts on Sui, opening up truly on-chain logic around data lifecycles and permissions.

Web3 Composability: Apps built on any chain or interface can use Walrus for storage with on-chain verification.

In short: Walrus doesn’t just store data, it makes it usable, programmable, and verifiable a core piece of infrastructure Web3 needs if we want rich apps that go beyond tokens and balance

#Walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc
$WAL

Blockchains are amazing at agreement who owns what, what logic ran, but they’re awful at heavy data. If you try to store big files directly on-chain images, videos, AI datasets, large app state you hit the wall fast: high fees, bloated state, slower sync for nodes, and painful UX. That’s why most “Web3 apps” quietly fall back to AWS or other cloud storage… which reintroduces trust, outages, and takedown risk.

How it stays reliable: Walrus uses erasure coding its Red Stuff approach to split a blob into encoded slivers and distribute them across many storage nodes. You don’t need every node online to recover the file enough slivers is enough. So if nodes go offline which happens in the real world, data can still be reconstructed. That’s the practical difference from a bunch of replicas or hope the gateway stays up:

Walrus is designed around failures and recovery.

Walrus exists to be the missing data layer. It runs on the Sui blockchain, but it doesn’t try to cram files into Sui. Instead it focuses on blob storage: large, unstructured files stored off-chain in a decentralized network, while on-chain logic can still reference and verify what’s stored. For builders, that’s the key: keep Sui for execution + coordination, and use Walrus for data that needs to be available and reliable.

From a builder’s perspective, the pitch is straightforward: stop pretending blockchains are file servers. Put heavy data where it belongs (Walrus), keep verification and programmability on-chain (Sui), and you get Web3 apps that don’t break the moment storage becomes the bottleneck.

#Walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc
$WAL

Walrus is one of those Web3 projects that makes sense once you see the problem it’s actually solving.

Most blockchains are great at executing logic, but terrible at handling data. You can’t realistically store videos, images, AI datasets, app state, or large files directly on-chain. So today, most Web3 apps quietly fall back on centralized cloud storage (AWS, Google Cloud, IPFS gateways), which re-introduces single points of failure, censorship risk, and trust assumptions.

Walrus exists to fix that gap.

At a high level, Walrus is a decentralized data availability and storage layer built to handle large, real-world data reliably. Instead of storing full files in one place, Walrus splits data into encoded pieces and distributes them across many independent storage nodes. As long as enough nodes are online, the data is always recoverable even if some go offline or fail.

What makes Walrus different from earlier storage systems is how it balances reliability and cost. It uses a custom encoding system called Red Stuff, which provides strong redundancy without massive duplication. That means data stays available and can “self-heal” when nodes drop out, but storage remains efficient enough for real applications to use at scale.

Why this matters for Web3 apps is simple

Apps need reliable data to function. Frontends, media, AI models, game assets, logs, and user content all depend on it. If that data disappears or becomes unavailable, the app breaks — no matter how decentralized the smart contracts are. Walrus lets developers build apps where data availability is a guarantee, not a hope.

Walrus also treats data as programmable. Ownership, access rules, and payments are handled on-chain (via Sui), while the heavy data itself lives off-chain but verifiably so. With features like Seal, developers can encrypt data and define who’s allowed to access it enabling private datasets, token-gated content, and controlled sharing without trusting a centralized provider.

Compared to traditional cloud storage:
Cloud storage is fast but centralized, censorable, and trust-based
Walrus is decentralized, verifiable, and designed to survive failures
Cloud providers control infrastructure; Walrus distributes it
Cloud data is opaque; Walrus data is cryptographically provable
In short, Walrus turns data into a first-class citizen of Web3. Not just something stored somewhere, but something apps can rely on, reason about, and build around the same way they already do with smart contracts.
#Walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc
$WAL

Under the hood, Dusk Network had to invent a lot of new tech to meet its goals. It’s not built on Ethereum or another chain – the team engineered everything from scratch, because existing blockchains weren’t up to the task of private, compliant finance.

For starters, Dusk’s smart contracts run on Rusk VM, a custom virtual machine built around zero-knowledge proofs . This essentially means smart contracts on Dusk can handle private data by design – a first in the blockchain world.

The consensus mechanism is bespoke too. Dusk uses a Segregated Byzantine Agreement with Proof of Blind Bid – a fancy way of saying it runs on an improved Proof-of-Stake where block producers bid secretly and separate nodes (called Provisioners) help secure the network . This design reduces network load and boosts security by splitting responsibilities. They’ve even tackled blockchain bloat: new nodes can sync extremely fast (in one block) and the ledger stays lean over time. Plus, the Dusk node software comes with a built-in web wallet and explorer, so anyone can interact with the network without relying on centralized services . All these innovations – from a privacy-focused VM to a unique consensus – were necessary for Dusk to create a platform capable of handling real-world assets privately and efficiently.
#Dusk @Dusk
$DUSK

Compliance and privacy do not go well, yet Dusk demonstrates that they can be used fraternally. With normal crypto, you have pseudo-anonymity - your wallet is not associated with your name other than by someone who knows that it belongs to you. This collapses in regulated markets. And consider the publicity of all your stock transactions; large transactions will lead to panic or front running.

Dusk fixes this by providing true privacy: transaction amounts and addresses are hidden on-chain by default (even block explorers don’t show them), but the system still allows oversight when needed. It uses tech like stealth addresses and ring signatures (inspired by privacy coins) to mask who’s sending what . Even network traffic is anonymized with onion routing, so your IP stays secret .

At the same time, Dusk bakes in compliance. For example, authorities can audit transactions if they have the right keys or user consent, and Dusk’s team even built a tool called Citadel to enable private KYC checks via zero-knowledge proofs

In short, Dusk lets honest users stay completely private while giving regulators the assurances they need – a balance that could open the door for institutions to embrace blockchain.

#Dusk @Dusk
$DUSK

Where Dusk Network is strong on privacy

Where traditional systems dominate compliance

And how Dusk bridges both worlds

Dusk Network may be any other blockchain at first sight, but it is not that. Think of a network that will never reveal your transactions and still have regulators satisfied - that is the idea of Dusk in a nutshell.

It is regulated and decentralized Layer-1, meant to combine the two worlds into one. It is the concept that the 24/7, no-middleman efficiency of crypto will be applied to the conventional financial industry, allowing such assets as stocks or bonds to reside on-chain.
The existing monetary system is old, cumbersome and can be quite exclusive  - Dusk strives to alter it.

Dusk ensures confidentiality as well as compliance by using a special and custom consensus, along with the latest cryptography techniques (zero-knowledge proofs). Simply put, you are able to trade and transact without revealing your data and the platform also satisfies KYC/AML and audit requirements. This privacy versus trust equilibrium is what Dusk Network will be best known, which may lead to a more inclusive and modernized financial ecosystem.

#Dusk @Dusk
$DUSK

Since the very beginning, Walrus has concentrated on making its decentralized storage easy to integrate to developers. An extensive collection of tools and libraries allows builders to integrate Walrus to their applications without needing to recreate the wheel. The official Walrus TypeScript SDK, developed by Mysten Labs, the creators of Sui, is the main entry point it lets developers communicate with Walrus over Node.js backends or directly in web browsers, including the ability to give users the option of paying to store data in their own crypto wallets. It implies that a dApp can make its users upload and operate data on Walrus without trust, and on-chain operations are performed automatically in the background by the SDK. Walrus has continued to make its developer experience better: in mid-2025, a big SDK release added the Walrus Upload Relay integration and native Quilt support, and increased upload performance and small-file efficiency of builders. Those additions made storing data on Walrus seem more like an express lane - and it took effect as Walrus grew to serve in excess of 758 TB of data in support of hundreds of projects by the end of 2025.

The Walrus Upload Relay is a lightweight proxy service that is used to upload files to Google using user devices and is highly beneficial to handle large files which are uploaded much faster and with ease. A Relay (run by a developer or the community) does not require a user to send his browser thousands of requests to various storage nodes; instead, a single upload is accepted and the data shards are distributed to each all of the nodes on the network. This does the heavy workload of the server and uploads become several times faster and more reliable, even the mobile users of the flaky connection can save large files via a Relay with very little effort. More importantly, the adoption of a Relay does not affect trust: the initial encoding and final on-chain certification is performed by the client, therefore, any malfunction of a relay would be established. At the other end of the spectrum, the Quilt feature is a solution to the other problem - dApps that must make use of large numbers of small files. Quilt has the ability to pack up to 666 small blobs into a single encoded object of quilt, reducing per-file overhead and costs by factors of orders of magnitude. For example, packaging hundreds of ~10 KB files together in a single quilt has been shown to cut storage fees by over 400x compared to uploading them individually . Each file in a quilt still gets its own identifier and can be retrieved independently, so developers don't sacrifice convenience while saving on costs

Together, the SDK, Upload Relay, and Quilt exemplify Walrus's deep commitment to builders: they make decentralized storage as developer-friendly as possible while preserving the performance and flexibility needed for real-world applications

#Walrus $WAL @WalrusProtocol

Walrus is gradually turning into the workhorse of data-intensive Web3 applications, making such offerings as AI platforms, media services, and dynamic websites become scalable. Rather than load a blockchain with the task of serving as a file server, Walrus pushes large pieces of content (4K videos, machine learning models, large datasets) out to a decentralized network of storage nodes. The Sui blockchain is used in this system as an ultra-reliable ledger - it keeps a record of who owns the data, whether the files are available, does payments, and applies access regulations, but does not store the large files themselves. This separation of labor allows decentralized apps to provide massive sums of content at low costs and in an open way. Already, Walrus has been used by builders to serve up interactive websites as well as AI training datasets, to content delivery networks and cross-chain data archives that previously were not realistically stored on-chain.

One key arena is AI. Walrus is a reliable data store of machine learning models and files so that these massive sources of ground truth data are immutable and can be reliably accessed by AI tasks at all times. The AI teams will be able to confirm that they have not been manipulated with training data and will be able to access them when they need them - which is essential in avoiding poisoned data and ensuring trust in model outputs. Walrus allows indeed decentralized content platforms in the media world. As an example, a Web3 video or music dApp can store high-definition media files on Walrus at an order of magnitude lower cost than centralized cloud storage, and on-chain logic in Sui works on content ownership and micropayments. Even well-established publishers are paying attention: Decrypt, a large crypto media company, is copying all of its content library to Walrus, and associating every article with a copy in Walrus, as a live demonstration of the practicability of decentralized media storage. Walrus also serves dynamic web content through Walrus Sites, which allow developers to run full websites and front-end apps on decentralized storage. This ensures web experience is censorship resilient and is accessible to users without a central web host. New content models are being developed based on this - creators can encrypt premium content on Walrus (podcasts, videos, etc.) and token-gate access it such that only verified subscribers or NFT holder can unlock it, and game developers can keep in-game assets on Walrus that only appear when players reach a specified on-chain condition. Walrus makes content-rich, interactive experiences fully decentralized by making use of on-chain programmability and off-chain scalability.

#Walrus @Walrus 🦭/acc
$WAL