Have you also been shocked by the sky-high bills of decentralized storage? Storing data on-chain can cost thousands of dollars, making it almost a luxury to fully control your own information.

Now, a new approach is breaking this deadlock. Traditional Filecoin and Arweave prevent data loss by taking a simple and crude method—repeated copying. Filecoin needs to replicate data 25 to 1000 times to be considered safe, while Arweave stores data permanently in one go, with prices soaring to $3500 per TB. Basically, to keep a single file safe, you’d have to print hundreds of copies and place them around the world—who can afford that?

Walrus Protocol uses an erasure coding algorithm called "Red Stuff," completely changing the approach. Instead of blindly copying data, it cleverly slices the data into many small fragments and disperses them across global nodes. The genius is that no single node needs to store the complete data. Even if two-thirds of the storage nodes fail simultaneously, the system can quickly reconstruct the original data from the remaining fragments. Sounds like some black tech, right?

The result is a direct reduction in costs. Walrus only needs 4 to 5 times redundancy to achieve, or even surpass, the reliability level of traditional solutions. Making large-scale on-chain data storage truly possible.