When it comes to decentralized storage, many people's first reaction is: "Is this just a rehash of Filecoin or Arweave?" But if you delve into Walrus's entire architecture, you'll find that it actually fills a long-overlooked market niche.

Filecoin is indeed powerful — but its DNA leans more towards "cold storage + long-term commitment." High verification costs and slow interaction speeds make it seem a bit "bulky" in certain scenarios. In contrast, Arweave takes the other extreme: one-time payment, permanent data on-chain. This logic is very friendly for historical archives, but it can be a bit overwhelmed when handling hot data that requires frequent updates, deletions, or access.

Walrus's key insight is very clear — **hot data + programmability**. It doesn't just store data passively; it turns the data itself into an on-chain asset. Blob objects uploaded to the Sui network (up to 14GB each) can be directly invoked by smart contracts, opening up new possibilities for dynamic NFT content, DeFi collateral, and AI model training collaborations. Honestly, neither Filecoin nor Arweave has truly achieved this yet.

From a technical perspective, Walrus uses a 2D erasure coding scheme instead of full replication. With just 4–5 times redundancy, it can tolerate up to 1/3 malicious nodes. In real network environments, this approach is actually more stable than full replication and easier to scale massively.

The economic model is designed to be quite "restrained": it doesn't promote a narrative of permanent storage, but instead adopts a time-limited leasing + renewal mechanism. Users don't have to pay upfront for data decades in the future, making it more suitable for scenarios like AI training datasets and social media content.