The practical question I keep coming back to is simple: where do you put data when you don’t fully trust yourself, your counterparties, or the jurisdiction you’re operating in? Most teams end up with awkward compromises—AWS plus encryption, IPFS plus something centralized to make it usable, or “temporary” databases that quietly become permanent. Everyone says privacy matters, but when deadlines hit, convenience wins.
That problem exists because storage isn’t just technical. It’s legal, operational, and psychological. Someone has to pay for it, someone is liable when it breaks, and someone gets blamed when regulators ask where the data lives. Decentralized storage systems often ignore that reality. They work in demos and feel brittle in production, especially when costs spike or retrieval latency surprises you.
Looking at #Walrus , I don’t think about the token first. I think about whether infrastructure like this can actually sit underneath real systems without becoming the weird part everyone tiptoes around. Running on Sui helps with throughput, but it doesn’t magically solve governance, compliance, or long-term incentives. Privacy-preserving storage sounds right until an auditor, a judge, or an ops engineer needs a clear answer fast.
My takeaway: this fits builders who already accept crypto-native assumptions and need large, tamper-resistant data blobs more than clean abstractions. It works if costs stay predictable and retrieval stays boring. It fails if humans need it to be simpler than it really is.