Walrus is a decentralized storage network that is a breakthrough in this space and is spearheaded by Mysten Labs (the brains behind Sui blockchain). This is now furthered by the Walrus Foundation. Walrus is a paradigm-shifting technology that changes how we deal with binary large objects in a world of Web3 and abolishes the traditional trade-offs that come with decentralized storage.
The game-change is the invention of “Red Stuff”, an efficient 2D erasure code. By comparison to full replication (exacting 25x+ for high security) or traditional Reed-Solomon codes (3x but costly with linear recovery complexity O(|blob|)), Red Stuff Provides Byzantine fault-tolerance with merely 4.5x replication overhead and facilitates self-healing recovery. The retrieval of missing “slivers” requires bandwidth linear in the missing data itself (O(|blob|/n)), making this approach highly scalable even for 500+ participants.
This is accomplished via clever 2D coding, where the blob is represented as a matrix, with the addition of Repair symbols in both the rows and columns, establishing primary and secondary slices per node. Authenticated Vector Commitments enable security against malicious Behaviour, as well as the addition of the first asynchronous Storage challenges.
Walrus has a new multi-stage era switching mechanism that scales permissionless node rotations seamlessly
