Decentralized storage has long faced a core issue—achieving data security often comes at the expense of efficiency, and high efficiency usually sacrifices security.

How does Filecoin handle this? By stacking copies. To ensure data isn't lost, they simply replicate multiple copies, resulting in 25 times storage redundancy. Calculations show that the costs are simply unmanageable. Arweave took a different approach: one-time payment for permanent storage. It sounds ideal, but for dynamic data updates and retrievals, these practical needs become theoretical. As for Reed-Solomon erasure codes, industry has used them for years, but they rely on complex polynomial calculations, which consume a lot of bandwidth during data recovery, making them unsuitable for high-frequency applications.

Faced with these issues, Walrus chose not to patch things up but to fundamentally overhaul the encoding logic.

What is the core innovation of Walrus's RedStuff 2D encoding? Simply put, it replaces complicated polynomial calculations with straightforward XOR operations. Data is split into primary and secondary slices, distributed across nodes for storage. This change directly boosts performance: the cost of data recovery on a single node is reduced to O(B/n), and the entire network recovery cost is just O(B). Even in extreme cases where two-thirds of the slices are lost, the system can still quickly reconstruct the data.

How effective is this in practice? Walrus keeps the storage replication factor within 4-5 times. Compared to Filecoin's 25x redundancy, that's a whole different level. Efficiency metrics are approaching those of centralized cloud services. The real strategy is that not only is security maintained without compromise, but costs are significantly reduced. This is the technological breakthrough that the storage sector needs.