Walrus, a decentralized storage project that raised $140 million, will become the DeepSeek moment of the SUI ecosystem?

Author: Frank, PANews

Decentralized storage protocol Walrus recently completed a US$140 million financing. This round of financing was led by Standard Crypto, with participation from institutions such as a16z crypto and Electric Capital, becoming the highest-value financing in recent projects on-chain.

As an old narrative, decentralized storage is still able to obtain financing of this scale in the current market environment, which has sparked discussions in the industry. From Walrus' perspective, it is not only trying to reshape the decentralized storage track by reducing costs by 100 times, but also a new layout for Mysten Labs to upgrade Sui performance and optimize token economics.

Walrus may reduce the cost of decentralized storage by 100 times

According to official information, Walrus is a decentralized storage and data availability protocol designed to provide a secure and efficient storage solution for large files and unstructured data. It was developed by Sui’s development team Mysten Labs and was built on the Sui blockchain with the goal of revolutionizing data management methods in decentralized networks.

From the perspective of technical characteristics, Walrus' core technology is error correction coding technology, which divides data into smaller cell fragments and distributes them on multiple storage nodes. This approach restores data even when up to two-thirds of node failures, ensuring high availability and reliability.

The more important practical significance of this innovation may be that in terms of cost, relying on error correction code technology, Walrus' replication factor has dropped to 4 to 5 times, significantly reducing storage costs and approaching the efficiency of centralized cloud services. For comparison, Filecoin's replication factor is about 25 times, while Arweave's replication factor is as high as 100-1000 times. By this calculation, Walrus storage costs may be 80-100 times lower than Filecoin and Arweave. In addition, due to file segmentation limitations, Walrus is also suitable for applications that require large amounts of data, such as AI datasets and media files.

According to SuperEx estimates, for 1TB of data, Arweave costs about $3,500 per year, Filecoin costs from $200 to $1,000, while Walrus costs only $50.

As of March 23, data showed that about 80TB of data storage has been carried out on Walrus' test network, with a total of more than 13.45 million addresses. In addition, there are 109 projects running on the test network, many of which are Walrus native projects. The project type is mainly mini-games, and it has attracted well-known institutions such as Tusky, Decrypt Media, and Chainbase to join cooperation.

Sui Eco's "turbocharger", 1EB storage target = 15% SUI token burning

Of course, in today's market environment, it seems difficult to gain high recognition from capital based on the narrative of technological innovation alone. For Walrus, another reason for achieving huge financing may be because it was made by Mysten Labs. Mysten Labs, as the development team of Sui Networks, completed a financing of US$336 million before Sui Networks was launched. This time, Walrus's leading investors, Standard Crypto, as well as institutions such as a16z crypto and Electric Capital, also appeared on Sui's investor list.

In the statement when Walrus was launched, it can be seen that Walrus's origins are derived from the need to upgrade the issue of Sui network storage. After Walrus was launched, it reduced the storage pressure on Sui network by providing efficient decentralized storage solutions.

In addition, according to SuperEx reports, each stored blob in Walrus needs to create metadata objects on Sui, which consumes SUI tokens as gas charges. If Walrus usage increases to 1EB (exabyte), it is estimated that about 240 million SUI (15% of the current circulation) may be consumed each year, indirectly affecting the network economy. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Filecoin's total storage capacity was approximately 4.2EB.

Mysten Labs also announced in March that it acquired Parasol, a Web3 gaming infrastructure startup. Combined with the performance improvement of Walrus, Sui Network may be focusing on AI and gaming in the future.

The massive entry of capital this time seems to remind the market that decentralized storage is still a potential market. According to a report by Codex.Storage in December 2024, as AI expands and more and more enterprises adopt a hybrid cloud approach in 2025, the decentralized storage market will usher in further market expansion.

Airdrop worth $80 million has been issued through NFT

The huge financing also made the market believe that Walrus may become another major airdrop. WAL is Walrus' native token with a maximum supply of 5 billion and an initial circulating supply of 1.25 billion. Walrus' official announcement shows that more than 60% of WAL will be used in the community. However, a careful study shows that this does not mean that the proportion of airdrops in the early stage will be very high. According to reports, a total of 10% of tokens will be used for user airdrops, of which 4% of the allocation will be allocated before the main network is online, and 6% will be allocated after the main network is online. In addition, 43% of the tokens are used for community reserves, and this part of the funds are used for the long-term development and growth of the Walrus ecosystem, including community funding and programs, developer support, Walrus core research, incentive programs, community activities, hackathons and other ecological projects. It is managed by the Walrus Foundation and is expected to be launched on March 27.

Investors have received a total of 7% of the shares and will be unlocked after 12 months after the main network is launched. Based on the 7% token share of financing of US$140 million, the cost of a single WAL obtained by investors is about US$0.4. WAL's valuation has reached US$2 billion, compared with Filecoin's current fully circulated market value of approximately US$6 billion.

At present, the 4% tokens before the main network is online have been distributed to users participating in the test network in the form of NFT, and the remaining 6% airdrop share will be distributed through community incentives and ecological participation after it is launched.

While the Web3 world is still exploring the ultimate form of the storage track, Walrus opens up a new path with a combination of "Error Correction Code

• Low Replication Factor". This is not only a revolution in storage costs, but also a paradigm breakthrough in Sui ecosystem self-iteration - by converting storage consumption into an economic engine for SUI tokens, Walrus is weaving a multi-dimensional value network covering data storage, on-chain interaction, and AI training.

With the advancement of the 1EB storage target, this behemoth that consumes 15% of the circulation tokens may become the best driving force for Sui's public chain growth. In 2025, when AI data demand is booming, can Walrus' 100 times cost advantage leverage the $100 billion cloud storage market? The answer may be hidden in the storage curve when the main network is started.