Traditional cloud storage is straightforward and crude—rent an apartment in the city center, even if you only store a single suitcase, you still pay the full rent. The emergence of Walrus has changed this game rule; it allows data to be disassembled and reassembled like LEGO bricks, filling every corner of the network, and you only pay for the space you actually use.

By January 2026, the decentralized storage battlefield has shifted from conceptual comparison to practical competition. Interestingly, in the market share battle between Filecoin and Arweave, Walrus suddenly jumps in, driving storage costs down to jaw-dropping levels. Everyone is curious—how is that possible?

The answer lies in the physical reconstruction of data itself.

Most distributed storage systems adopt a "repeat" strategy, backing up files three or five times to prevent loss. It sounds secure, but the cost is obvious—three times the hard drives, three times the bandwidth, three times the cost. Walrus took a different approach by introducing Red-stuff erasure coding technology. To use an analogy, it breaks a complete porcelain vase into a hundred shards and disperses them across nodes worldwide. The brilliant part is—you don't need to gather all the shards. Just randomly collect a dozen or so, and a mathematical algorithm can perfectly restore the entire vase. This "distributed reassembly" logic has completely rewritten storage economics.