Recently, I’ve been looking into the Walrus project. At first glance, there’s nothing particularly special about it, but upon closer inspection, I realized it hits a major issue in Web3.

Simply put, blockchain is inherently unsuitable for handling large files. Original images for NFTs, media libraries in games, various media content—these things simply cannot be directly stored on the chain. Traditional cloud storage also has a fatal flaw—completely centralized. If the service provider encounters issues or decides to delist, your data could disappear overnight.

What Walrus aims to do is transform large file storage into a decentralized model. For Web3 media platforms and chain games, this is absolutely essential. Nobody wants their application to crash because a single storage provider goes offline. Compared to traditional solutions, this distributed architecture is much more resilient—data isn’t locked by any single entity, and the system’s robustness is maximized.

However, to be honest, storage is much more complex than it appears. It’s not just about dispersing data across a few nodes; it must also operate stably under high concurrency, handle frequent node churn, and keep costs under control. Many decentralized storage projects in the industry have failed—overhyped in whitepapers, but in real-world environments, they’re slow as snails and prohibitively expensive.

So, the key questions boil down to two points: Can Walrus’s technology truly withstand the pressure of a production environment? Can it strike a good balance between performance and cost? If both are addressed, it could become one of the foundational infrastructures of the Web3 ecosystem. Otherwise, no one will willingly adopt an unreliable system.

In the long run, this project is worth paying close attention to. Its success or failure will directly determine whether Web3 applications can truly support large-scale data loads in the future. Web3 is never short of innovative applications; what’s missing is a steady, capable infrastructure-level player that can really get the job done.