The underlying logic behind business breakthroughs is often very simple: cut away those unnecessary costs. Cloud computing did exactly that back in the day—virtualization technology solved the problem of idle servers, creating a trillion-dollar market. Now, it’s Web3 storage’s turn.

What is the core issue faced by traditional decentralized storage solutions? Simply put, excessive redundancy. Projects like Filecoin and Arweave duplicate a file into a dozen or more copies to ensure data isn’t lost, distributing them across various miners. It sounds very secure, but at what cost? Over 80% of storage expenses are actually paying for these "backups," not the true value of the data itself.

Walrus has chosen a different path. Instead of desperately storing redundant data, it focuses on the algorithmic level—replacing physical redundancy with mathematical redundancy. In simple terms, it encodes a file into multiple fragments, and you only need to keep a small portion of them (for example, 1.5 times the original data size) to fully restore the original content. It sounds a bit like magic, but behind it is solid coding mathematics.

How significant are the results? According to technical documentation, under the same security standard of 11 nines of durability, Walrus’s storage efficiency can be improved by 5 to 8 times compared to traditional solutions. This isn’t a mere percentage improvement; it’s a multiple-level difference.

When a global SocialFi application needs to process petabytes of user images and videos daily, you realize how deadly storage costs can be. Walrus offers not just a "better option," but the "only economically sustainable option." Essentially, it’s redefining the cost benchmark of the entire sector, shifting everyone’s focus from "who can be more redundant" to "who can be more efficient."

From this perspective, the investment isn’t just in storage payment tokens, but a bet on a new efficiency paradigm.