Red Stuff and the End of Inefficient Repair
The defining innovation of Walrus Protocol is its Red Stuff encoding algorithm. Traditional erasure coding forces networks to rebuild entire files just to repair a small missing piece. That approach breaks at scale.
Red Stuff uses two-dimensional erasure coding. Data is arranged in a matrix, encoded across both rows and columns. Each node stores a unique combination of these slivers.
When a node fails, the network does not panic. It repairs only what is missing, using local row or column data. Bandwidth usage scales with the size of the lost fragment, not the size of the full file.
The result is high durability with far lower redundancy. Walrus can survive extreme node failures while keeping replication efficient. This is not incremental improvement. It is structural efficiency, and it is the reason the system can scale without bleeding resources.
