Honestly, every time I see DeFi projects boasting hundredfold returns, NFT auctions fetching sky-high prices, or Layer2 competing in TPS, I always want to ask a fundamental question: where exactly is the massive amount of data generated by these applications stored? Who ensures that they are both secure and permanently accessible?

The current situation is actually quite awkward. You are either forced to choose centralized giants like AWS or Alibaba Cloud, enduring single points of failure and censorship risks; or you tinker with early decentralized storage solutions, only to be discouraged by inefficiency and exorbitant bills. It’s a real dilemma.

At this moment, Walrus Protocol is like a quietly diligent engineer, with no marketing noise, quietly solving this fundamental problem with technology — it is the true "heart" of the entire Web3 world.

**How does erasure coding work?**

Traditional decentralized storage follows this pattern: the same data is fully replicated across multiple nodes. It sounds reliable, but in reality, it’s a resource-wasting monster, with costs soaring linearly.

Walrus doesn’t take this route. It introduces erasure coding technology — a concept originating from aerospace communication and the mathematics of distributed systems. The core idea is: split the original data into several chunks, then use mathematical algorithms to generate additional checksum blocks. The clever part is that even if some data chunks are lost or damaged, the system can still fully recover the data using the remaining chunks — this is true fault tolerance.

Compared to full replication, this approach significantly reduces storage costs while maintaining the same level of security and reliability. For the entire Web3 ecosystem, it means cheaper, more efficient data storage infrastructure.