Walrus is a pretty cute name, but don’t be fooled — it’s not an ocean creature, but a decentralized storage protocol on the Sui blockchain. Its core promise is simple: cheap, secure, and never offline.

What’s the traditional cloud storage approach? Copy, copy, and copy again. Duplicate your data a hundred times and scatter it around the world. This method is safe, but the cost is terrifying. Walrus takes a different approach: it uses erasure coding technology to fragment files into countless small pieces, add redundancy backups to each piece, and then disperse them across global nodes.

Here’s an example to make it clear. If you upload a 1GB video, Walrus will cut it into 30 pieces. Even if 10 pieces are lost, the system can still restore the full file using the remaining 20. Sounds impressive, right? The effect is indeed powerful — storage costs are reduced from 100 times the traditional replication factor down to just 4-5 times. Data resilience also skyrockets — even if one-third of nodes go offline or act maliciously, your files can still be recovered.

Tech-savvy users love it. The Humanity protocol is a decentralized identity network that recently migrated 10 million user credentials from IPFS to Walrus. Why? Because Walrus offers on-chain metadata management plus programmable access control, allowing users to decide what to disclose. Want to prove your age without revealing your birthday? No problem. It prevents data misuse and blocks AI-generated fake identities. This is what decentralized identity should look like.