2026 has arrived, and the rapid iteration of generative AI and decentralized social protocols has highlighted the value of data. In this Web3 era, how to store massive amounts of data, where to store it, and who will maintain it—these questions have become more urgent than ever before. Mysten Labs' Walrus decentralized storage network provides its own answers with an innovative technical approach.

Many people's understanding of storage solutions still remains in traditional multi-replica backup thinking—copying one piece of data into multiple copies and scattering them across different nodes. But Walrus plays by a different logic. It introduces erasure coding technology (the industry calls it "Erasure Coding"), breaking files into fine-grained fragments and distributing them across the entire network. The brilliant part is that even if more than 2/3 of the nodes in the network go offline simultaneously, the system can still completely recover the original data. This design directly cuts storage costs by nearly 90%, and read speed can keep up with the pace of Web2 applications—for AI training tasks or 4K streaming services that frequently call large files, this is currently the most solid choice for underlying infrastructure.

Entering early 2026, Walrus's ecosystem is experiencing a turning point. The recent Tusky user migration deadline (January 19) has sparked considerable discussion in the industry, reflecting that the entire decentralized storage track is evolving from social application-driven to AI application-driven direction. From its initial role as a decentralized social tool to now serving AI sovereign computing, Walrus is thinking about how to make its protocol truly become the backbone of next-generation Web3 applications.