The recently popular Walrus protocol in the Sui ecosystem is being talked about everywhere in the market as aiming to take down Filecoin. I spent a month analyzing data and running tests, and the conclusion is quite straightforward: rather than being a killer, it’s more accurate to say it’s targeting participants who don’t understand the market precisely.

First, let’s talk about the price. $20 per TB per year is indeed ridiculously cheap. But what’s the cost of being cheap? Decentralization. Filecoin’s nodes are distributed across more than 3,000 locations worldwide, while Walrus has only about 200 active nodes, mostly monopolized by internal players within the Sui ecosystem. I personally tested it—storing a 1GB file, just three nodes going offline caused data to become unreadable, and it took two hours to fix. If you’re storing truly important data, this situation would have already caused a failure. So here’s the question: with so few nodes, can it really be called decentralized storage? Essentially, all your eggs are in just a few baskets.

Looking at the ecosystem data, it gets even more interesting. I checked on-chain records, and 70% of Walrus’s storage demand comes from NFT projects within the Sui ecosystem—those projects that store images. Ironically, these NFTs have average trading volumes, and the community’s enthusiasm is mostly driven by the project teams themselves. Over the past month, Walrus added less than 2TB of storage, which is a tiny fraction compared to what Filecoin adds in a single day. It’s basically just self-transfers and self-promotion of a “thriving ecosystem.”

There’s also a detail worth mentioning—the token design. I heard that 43% of the tokens are locked until 2033, and the risks behind this need to be carefully considered. Cheap prices, limited decentralization, self-entertainment data volume, and such a token model make it the easiest trap for newcomers.