Walrus Protocol: High-Speed Decentralized Storage Layer for the Web3 Era

One of the biggest weaknesses of Web3 today is the extremely slow decentralized storage experience. While blockchain has achieved transaction processing speeds measured in milliseconds, downloading a file from a decentralized network still takes tens of seconds, creating a "latency gap" compared to traditional cloud infrastructure.
@WalrusProtocol was created to directly address this issue with an architecture designed around speed.
Instead of copying data dozens of times like Filecoin or Arweave, Walrus uses Red Stuff – a two-way erasure coding technology. Files are divided into small grid-like pieces, enabling data recovery even when many nodes are lost, but with only 4.5 times overhead instead of 25 times as in traditional replication models. This saves bandwidth and accelerates access speed.
#Walrus operates on an asynchronous architecture. When users read data, the system only needs a quorum of 2f+1 nodes to respond, without waiting for slow nodes. The client always fetches data from the fastest responding nodes, creating a smooth experience close to traditional web.
Walrus's self-healing mechanism is also extremely lightweight. When a node goes offline, the system only needs to load a small portion of data to recover the lost shard, not the entire file, allowing the network to self-repair without causing congestion.
Additionally, Walrus uses Sui blockchain as the control plane to handle metadata and payments, helping nodes store all resources for data serving. Experimental results show that Walrus achieves low latency, high throughput, and linear scalability with bandwidth. $WAL