Having worked in the Web3 infrastructure space for many years, my takeaway is that the three essential elements for a project to survive are technological barriers, practical applications, and ecosystem collaboration.

Since WAL's mainnet launch in March this year, its recent activities have been very frequent, especially after entering 2026. I feel that the distributed storage sector has taken on a different vibe.

It’s no longer just a simple "warehouse" for stacking data, but through DePIN, it decentralizes physical infrastructure and privacy computing, tightly integrating with the real economy. In other words, it’s building a data bridge between Web3 and the real world.

Let the data speak. As of January this year, the WAL network has processed 1.11PB of encoded data, with 14.5 million storage units. There are 121 storage nodes and 103 storage operators participating. From its initial launch to now, the ecosystem has grown more than tenfold. Compared to this, the growth rate of peers is honestly not that impressive.

On the technical side, WAL’s killer feature is combining DePIN with the latest storage technologies. What I value most is its partnership with Pipe Network — Pipe has 280,000 PoP nodes distributed across communities worldwide. WAL leverages these nodes to build a decentralized content distribution layer. No matter where you are on the network, you can read and write data from the nearest node, with overall latency kept within 50 milliseconds.

This performance metric is quite interesting — compared to traditional centralized CDNs like Cloudflare, WAL’s experience is already on par. This is what I find truly worth paying attention to. It’s not just about impressive technical indicators, but genuinely changing whether decentralized storage can be usable.