Imagine holding a magic mirror in your hand. When shattered into thousands of pieces, each tiny shard can reflect the entire world—not just a corner of it. This "fragmented yet complete" miracle is the technological revolution that the Walrus protocol is demonstrating in the field of decentralized storage.

As of early 2026, Web3 is undergoing a profound shift from "financialization" to "datafication." Large model training data, on-chain gaming assets, decentralized social content... these massive amounts of information urgently need an outlet. But what about traditional distributed storage solutions? They always swing between "high-cost redundancy" and "inefficient recovery."

Walrus's "proof of storage" approach takes a different perspective—it aims to build a "genetic backtracking system" for the digital world.

**Why don't we need "copies"?**

The logic of traditional decentralized storage is like a photocopy shop. Want to ensure data isn't lost? Then store a copy on hard drives around the world. Security is security, but the cost is huge bandwidth waste and storage redundancy.

Walrus uses erasure coding technology. Sounds academic? Actually, it's like a high-dimensional Sudoku game—it doesn't store a complete copy of the file but encodes the data into a series of related fragments.

The most amazing part: even if half or more of the nodes in the entire network go offline simultaneously, as long as you still hold a small portion of the remaining fragments, you can fully recover the original data. This is true resilient storage.