The preservation of knowledge is crucial to the continuation of human civilization. But the reality is quite sobering—libraries, universities, and research institutions struggle with the costs of storing digital archives every year, and also worry about the risks of service providers going bankrupt or changing policies.

This is not a minor issue. Globally, research data generated each year amounts to several petabytes (PB). Raw data from particle colliders, star maps captured by telescopes, long-term biological gene monitoring records—all need to be securely stored, possibly for decades before they can be utilized. The cost of traditional cloud storage? Unaffordable.

The distributed storage protocol Walrus Protocol aims to address this pain point. Its approach is: a very low fixed-cost model enables research institutions to plan digital preservation on a century-scale, while on-chain notarization ensures data integrity and timestamp records. Scientific achievements gain an immutable notarization.

Digitization of cultural heritage faces the same dilemma. Museums are digitizing precious artifacts, ancient books, and historical footage in high resolution—these terabyte (TB) and even petabyte (PB) level archives are shared human assets. War, disasters, and political factors can lead to data loss. Distributed network capabilities can mitigate these risks. Interestingly, by integrating programmable storage features, administrators can finely control access permissions: the general public can view low-resolution versions, authorized scholars can access original files, and all operations are recorded with on-chain audit logs.

What is the more ambitious vision? To create a permanent knowledge base distributed globally and maintained collectively by the community. Individuals and organizations can contribute storage backups at minimal marginal cost to public datasets such as open-source code repositories, Wikipedia snapshots, and environmental monitoring data. Step by step, this builds the digital foundation of human civilization.

This truly goes beyond mere commercial considerations.