In the rapid iteration of the Web3 ecosystem, decentralized storage has been stuck on a core challenge—how to reduce copying costs while ensuring data security. Traditional solutions face a dilemma: either low efficiency or constant compromises between data recovery and security.

Mysten Labs, based on the Sui ecosystem, has developed the Walrus Protocol, which employs a revolutionary technical approach to break this deadlock. The project's native token $WAL has recently become a hot topic in the crypto market.

**Technical Breakthrough: How Red Stuff Erasure Coding Rewrites Storage Rules**

Walrus's core competitiveness lies in its Red Stuff encoding technology. This solution eliminates a stubborn industry problem—the myth that "high availability must mean high replication."

Unlike simple brute-force copying methods used by IPFS and Arweave, Walrus adopts a sharding strategy: splitting raw data into N shards and generating M redundant shards. As long as any N shards are obtained, the complete data can be recovered. What does this mean? The replication factor can drop from over 100 times in traditional schemes to 4 times in the current testnet, with the mainnet aiming even for 3-4 times.

But the logic behind these numbers is even more noteworthy. Compared to RS coding used by Storj and Sia, Red Stuff reduces the data recovery cost per node from O(B) to O(B/n), and the total recovery cost for the entire network is only O(B). In other words, in a decentralized environment where nodes are constantly joining and leaving, this system has inherent anti-risk capabilities.

This is not just an optimization of numbers but a redefinition of the underlying logic of decentralized storage—replacing more redundancy with smarter algorithms, allowing the network to maintain reliability while significantly reducing operational costs. Compared to various existing storage solutions, this approach represents a different path.