I've been using Walrus for nearly a year now, and I have to be honest — the project definitely has solid technical chops, but the actual experience falls far short of what the official narrative promises. Cost control and system stability are where the problems are massive, to the point where it's basically unreliable as a production environment solution. The decentralized storage concept has been hyped for so long, and Walrus wants to break through in the Sui ecosystem, but coding and programmability alone simply aren't enough.

The real killer is poor cost predictability. Storage fees are priced in WAL tokens at 0.0001 WAL/MiB/epoch — sounds clear on paper, but it's riddled with hidden costs. WAL price volatility is terrifying — it dropped to $0.115 in December last year, and now it's back to $0.14, which looks like modest growth, but the May peak was $0.76, a difference of over 6x. Storing 1TB of data costs anywhere from $20 to over $130 depending on the token price at any given time. Enterprise customers can't possibly do financial budgeting under such uncertainty — it's a nightmare.

There's an even bigger trap — all these low prices right now are entirely subsidized. The team allocated 10% of total token supply for linear release to subsidize storage, distributed over 50 months. The mainnet launched in March 2025, and it's been nearly a year, leaving about 40 months of subsidies remaining. Once that money runs out, real costs could spike 5 to 10 times over. At that point, it's anyone's guess whether this whole model survives.