Uploading files is completely different in the worlds of Web2 and Web3.

Web2 is straightforward—click upload, your file is broken into pieces, packaged via TCP/IP protocol, and sent to centralized servers on Amazon AWS or Google Cloud, and that's it. But what about Web3? Especially systems like Walrus, which are based on decentralized networks and erasure coding technology, the complexity skyrockets, and the ingenuity follows.

To truly understand how Mysten Labs achieves efficient storage through Walrus, I spent the entire night studying Figure 4 and pseudocode in the technical documentation. Today, I want to take you through the complete journey of a piece of data (Blob) in the Walrus network from a first-person perspective.

**First Stop: Birth and Transformation**

The story begins at the client side. When you decide to upload a high-definition NFT image, this image doesn't go directly to the blockchain. Instead, a more sophisticated process quietly starts on your computer.

Your device runs encoding algorithms locally, performing a special transformation on the image. This isn't just simple compression; it's a magic transformation called erasure coding. The image is split into fragments, and then redundant data is generated through mathematical algorithms, ensuring that even if some fragments are lost, the entire file can still be fully recovered.

The most critical part of this stage is that all processing happens on the client side. Your privacy is protected, and the file is transformed into a form suitable for transmission over a distributed network.