Have you ever experienced this—opening an old folder and finding that what you once saved has disappeared? It sounds like a common annoyance, but in the blockchain world, it becomes a deadly risk.

Imagine: your NFT ownership is recorded on the chain, but what about the images and metadata it points to? Perhaps they were quietly lost on a server. Maybe the original data source has been shut down. Verification becomes an illusion.

Many people in the blockchain ecosystem choose to turn a blind eye; after all, the reputation of "decentralization" is already loud. But Walrus doesn’t think so. It treats data issues as a hard requirement.

What exactly does it do? It splits files into encoded fragments and disperses them across numerous independent nodes for storage. The advantage of this design is: even if several nodes go offline, the entire file can still be recovered. The system’s redundancy is high enough that a single point of failure doesn’t threaten data integrity.

This is the charm of distributed storage—it doesn’t rely on a centralized storage provider but depends on mathematics and network topology to ensure availability. To some extent, this is the true meaning of "permanent on the chain."