If we define the early stage of blockchain as the "Internet of Value" era—that is, solving the problems of trust and value transfer—then what is currently dawning is actually a more ambitious direction: the "Memory Internet."

What does this mean? Humanity's civilization for the first time has the possibility to store those vast, unstructured things—photos, documents, data models, personal experience trajectories, organizational knowledge bases—in a way that is censorship-resistant, verifiable, and capable of being preserved across generations.

It sounds a bit abstract, but it becomes clear from a different perspective. For thousands of years, the memory of civilization has been like imprints on physical carriers—clay tablets, papyrus, books, film, hard drives. Each update of the carrier has been accompanied by irretrievable loss. The Library of Alexandria was burned, countless old photos faded—these are all "hardware failures" of human memory.

In the digital age, people thought the problem was solved. But in fact, it’s even more dangerous. Because now, data is entirely dependent on a few centralized cloud service providers. One company, one decision, one administrative order can delete, tamper with, or increase prices with a single click, or go offline due to bankruptcy, regulatory changes, or geopolitical conflicts. Your data’s life and death are now in someone else’s hands.

This is why the combination of distributed storage protocols + public chains has such enormous potential. Solutions represented by Walrus and the Sui ecosystem are creating a new historical inflection point.

**A Radical Redefinition of Permanence**

Rather than relying on a company's servers never to go down, it’s better to depend on a combination of technologies like global distributed nodes, erasure coding, and on-chain availability proofs. The logic is simple: as long as there is a sufficient proportion of nodes surviving in the global consensus network—even if a region is disconnected, a large number of nodes exit, or some countries set up network barriers—data can theoretically be restored indefinitely. This approaches the concept of "civilization-level redundancy"—far beyond any single company's backup plan.

**Memory Becomes Living**

Traditional archives are static—they remain unchanged. But data stored with protocols like Walrus can be programmed. Smart contracts can set automatic update rules, version iterations, delayed disclosures, encryption and decryption, and even "digital inheritance transfer"—you can set a data to be inherited by family members after your death for a certain number of years. Memory is no longer a static artifact but becomes a living, interactive, and value-adding entity.

**A Reversal of Cost Structures**

In the past, storage was purely expensive. But when storage itself becomes a vital infrastructure of the network, driven by storage incentives and usage rewards, "preserving human civilization’s memory" transforms into a self-consistent economic activity. Long-term preservation of high-value information like scientific data, historical archives, cultural heritage, and personal life records will naturally feedback into the network’s security and scalability.

The Walrus protocol of this generation may quietly change the material basis and intergenerational transmission of "memory" just like the printing press did for human civilization. 2026 might well be the beginning of this turning point.