The Web3 ecosystem will face an unavoidable challenge in 2026: data storage. As AI applications explode in growth, traditional decentralized storage solutions are either prohibitively expensive or lack flexibility, becoming a bottleneck for on-chain application expansion.

Walrus Protocol offers an alternative based on real data. This storage system, built on the Sui blockchain, uses Reed-Solomon erasure coding technology to reduce storage costs to one five-hundredth of Arweave's level, with data availability reaching 99.99%. It may sound like just numbers, but the underlying value is: it’s cheap, and can dynamically modify and delete data, making compliance requirements like GDPR no longer a nightmare for decentralized storage.

In practical applications, this solution has already been adopted by projects within the Sui ecosystem. Projects like Tusky and TradePort, after integration, handle an average of over 10PB of data daily, covering everything from NFT metadata to AI training datasets. This indicates that the demand is real, and commercial deployment is underway.

Even more interesting is the cross-chain design. Walrus’s interoperability architecture breaks the constraints of storage services being tied to a single chain. Data is no longer just the private property of a specific blockchain but can flow across chains. As leading exchanges evaluate listing its token and collaborations with AI infrastructure projects like Bittensor deepen, this project is expanding from a data layer role within the Sui ecosystem to a broader multi-chain space.