Recently, Walrus Protocol has been trending — they announced that the total network storage data has surpassed 3PB, and the entire community is cheering and celebrating as if seeing a bright future for distributed storage. But digging deeper, the story behind this number is much more complicated.

Breaking down these 3PB of data, you'll find a harsh reality: over 60% of the new data directly comes from the state history archives of the Sui mainnet, with these uploads mostly funded by the Sui Foundation or the core development team. Additionally, about 25% comes from state backups of leading DeFi protocols like Scallop and Aftermath Finance. In total, up to 85% of the storage growth isn't organic adoption by the ecosystem but rather the expansion of Sui's on-chain data, which is then uploaded to Walrus.

This raises an unavoidable question: Are we witnessing the rise of an independent, reliable data layer protocol, or are we simply observing the inevitable "data overflow" caused by the expansion of the Sui ecosystem? If it's the latter — and frankly, it's highly likely — then the entire valuation logic of Walrus needs to be re-evaluated. It will be tightly bound to Sui, becoming a derivative tool of Sui rather than an asset with independent value.

To understand the essence of this "data overflow," we need to look at the nearly symbiotic technical relationship between Walrus and Sui. The deeper their coupling, the more fragile Walrus's independence becomes. This isn't pessimism; it's a reminder: numbers may look good, but you need to see clearly what the true driving force behind those numbers is.