While browsing social media on New Year's Eve, I came across an interesting post. The Walrus team announced that their mainnet will launch in 2025, and by 2026, they aim to make all internet data verifiable. At first glance, the slogan sounds ambitious, but upon closer thought, it's not just hype—what Walrus has quietly been changing behind the scenes this year is deeper than most people realize.

Let's look at a recent example. At the end of December last year, Unchained, a well-respected podcast in the crypto community, announced they would start storing their articles and audio/video content with Walrus. This choice is worth pondering. Unchained specializes in reporting on topics others might shy away from—exchange insider info, regulatory battles, project black histories. Storing such content on AWS or Google Cloud always carries risks. A simple notice could wipe out years of accumulated content.

But Walrus is completely different. What does storing data on-chain mean? It means you pay for storage, and no matter how much power you have, you can't delete it. This resistance to censorship is a real necessity for independent media. And the cost isn't high—after Quilt's upgrade last year, storage efficiency improved, and WAL, which costs only a few cents per MB, can store a 100MB podcast for two years at just a few dollars—cheaper than traditional cloud storage, and you don't have to worry about account freezes.

The more core aspect is verifiability. The biggest pain point for traditional media is credibility—if you publish a report and the next day someone claims you're spreading rumors, how can you prove otherwise? Screenshots can be edited. But on-chain data is different: timestamps, hash values, storage proofs—all are recorded. This provides a hard guarantee of information authenticity, which is crucial for building the credibility system of independent media.