Decentralized storage has seen plenty of bloodshed in recent years. Arweave attracted a lot of attention with its "pay once, store forever" concept, while Filecoin relies on miner incentive mechanisms. But by 2026, the situation has clearly changed—Walrus protocol's actual performance on Sui has already left these two veteran players far behind.

The most obvious difference is cost. Walrus uses Red Stuff encoding technology to drive storage costs to the lowest point— for files of the same size, the cost is only one-fifth of Arweave's and one-third of Filecoin's. Moreover, it avoids getting caught in complex miner games, resulting in higher data availability. This is very critical.

From a tokenomics perspective, $WAL's design is smarter than ARweave and FIL. Arweave's token mainly benefits from speculative hype, whereas Walrus is different—it drives demand through actual storage consumption. The Storage Fund mechanism makes fee income predictable in the long term, preventing prices from fluctuating wildly like a roller coaster. Staking $WAL to participate in network maintenance offers stable and transparent rewards, far better than the confusing yield models of Filecoin mining.

The comparison of real-world use cases is even clearer. Arweave excels at permanent storage of small files, Filecoin is more suited for large data transactions, while Walrus specializes in big file scenarios like blobs. Storage needs for AI datasets, gaming assets, and decentralized social media are all within its scope. Plus, with seamless integration with Sui's high-performance smart contracts, many million-user-level dApps are already collaborating with it. Walrus's daily active storage volume has long surpassed these early projects.

From an investment perspective, $WAL's circulating market cap is still relatively low, and the Sui ecosystem's dividends have yet to be fully unleashed. Compared to those already high-flying AR and FIL, Walrus clearly has more room to grow. Recently, institutional funds have indeed been repositioning—its technological edge, more robust economic model, and active ecosystem make Walrus truly hold the key to the second half of the storage race.