When exploring blockchain communities, the most common topics you hear are still the old clichés—how to innovate smart contracts, how to design token economics, whether TPS can break through the ceiling. But there’s one thing that’s often overlooked, yet it supports the entire Web3 ecosystem—data availability.

Recently, a project called Walrus Protocol has quietly made some noise in this field, worth taking a look.

In simple terms, Walrus is a decentralized system tailored for ultra-large-scale data storage and distribution. It’s not here to disrupt traditional blockchain storage, but to add a layer of efficient "data availability middleware" on top, providing data infrastructure for other public chains and L2 solutions.

Think about it, AI and big data have developed rapidly in the past two years, and the amount of data generated by Web3 applications has exploded. The old methods of storing data are either prohibitively expensive or inefficient, unable to keep up with this growth. Walrus is designed to address this pain point.

Regarding its core competitiveness, it mainly manifests in three aspects. First is cost, which is its brightest point. Through erasure coding technology and optimized redundancy strategies, Walrus has drastically reduced storage costs by several orders of magnitude. Compared to other decentralized storage solutions on the market, its costs may be only one percent of theirs. Such a price is practically dirt cheap.