The most urgent issue at hand is that over 90% of global data is controlled by just a few centralized cloud storage giants, making censorship, leaks, and arbitrary price hikes commonplace. This monopolistic situation is especially unreasonable in the Web3 era.

The Walrus protocol was born out of this context, with a straightforward goal: to reclaim user data control from these oligopolies. As a decentralized storage solution on the Sui chain, it offers applications and individuals a secure, private, and affordable storage experience, truly turning the concept of "data sovereignty" into reality.

From a technical perspective, Walrus's design is quite robust. It adopts a blob-oriented storage model, combined with erasure coding and distributed hash table technology, enabling efficient slicing of files and dispersing them across a global network of nodes. Once users upload data, the system automatically ensures redundancy and high availability—even if many nodes go offline, data access remains seamless and smooth.

The brilliance of this architecture lies in its cost—almost negligible compared to traditional cloud storage (with clear advantages when billed per GB)—and its inherent resistance to censorship. Without a central server, there is no single point of control, allowing sensitive corporate information, creator content, and DApp metadata to be reliably protected.

The lifeblood of the ecosystem is the $WAL token. Token holders can stake tokens to operate storage nodes, contributing bandwidth and storage capacity while earning rewards; they can also lock tokens to participate in on-chain governance, influencing the protocol's development direction. As Walrus expands into DeFi functionalities, $WAL gradually integrates into liquidity mining, staking, lending, and other scenarios, creating a positive feedback loop between token value and network growth.