Web3 projects generally face an awkward reality: although they promote decentralization, the front-end code, videos, and images of DApps are mostly still hosted on centralized cloud service providers' servers. It's like renting a territory— the room is spacious and solid, but the monthly bills remain high, and the landlord always holds the keys to seize the property. Startups often get overwhelmed by costs before they even turn a profit.

This "seemingly decentralized, actually highly centralized" situation is being broken today. Several storage protocols in the market are exploring this issue: Filecoin is like a cold storage, suitable for long-term archiving; Arweave is more like an eternal library, pursuing permanent information preservation. Walrus Protocol, on the other hand, takes a completely different technical approach.

Its core innovation is to no longer have each node carry a complete data copy. Instead, Walrus uses erasure coding technology—sharding data across nodes worldwide. You don't need to collect all fragments to restore the original data; just a subset of nodes being available is enough. This design significantly reduces storage redundancy and bandwidth requirements.

From an architectural perspective, this is an important iteration of storage layer infrastructure. It directly addresses the real pain points of Web3 applications, rather than staying at the level of idealistic promotion.