Imagine a scenario: you operate a "Data Circulation Platform" on the blockchain. Your inventory isn't daily necessities but training datasets, whitelist data, material packages, research reports, and risk management lists. Your buyers are also quite special—AI applications, blockchain projects, various collaboration teams. The most pressing questions follow: How to ensure that each buyer receives exactly the same data every time? How to prove that the data hasn't been tampered with during circulation? How to make the entire process—transactions, data delivery, after-sales support—traceable, rather than relying on WeChat group screenshots to "prove"?

The ambition of Walrus Protocol lies here—it aims to standardize the entire "data circulation" process. Traditional data is scattered across cloud drives, web pages, local warehouses, managed in a fragmented way. In the on-chain system, data becomes an object that can be reliably referenced. How to understand this? For example, you publish a dataset, and other applications point to it via a hash value, enabling all participants to collaborate around the same fact; when you update the data, the update record itself is permanently preserved; when you deliver to partners, the verification isn't "I said I delivered it," but "this data is indeed on the chain and its content is fully verifiable."

This design may seem simple, but it touches on the most costly parts of blockchain collaboration: the alignment cost among participants, the blame-shifting cost, and the post-event review cost. Every inefficient "you say, I listen" alignment costs time and money.

So, what does this have to do with token economics? Tokens serve as the "circulation chips" for the entire system. They turn the complete chain of "storage, usage, delivery" into a settled, verifiable action. Once data consumption truly becomes a high-frequency operation—AI applications retrieving data, blockchain games updating configurations in real-time, organizations pulling member lists—the value of infrastructure no longer depends on "how much it is promoted," but on "how many participants rely on it daily."

If this mechanism truly works, you won't often see it trending in industry hotspots; instead, it will become like water, electricity, and the internet—fundamental infrastructure: no one discusses it every day, but everyone depends on it. That is the real long-term value.