Decentralized storage, in simple terms, is a constant trade-off between cost, security, and usability. Take Filecoin, for example, which relies on a high replication factor to ensure data security, resulting in high storage costs; and Arweave, which claims to offer permanent storage but can only handle cold data, limiting its use cases.

The Walrus protocol's self-developed RedStuff encoding technology is a breakthrough. It inherits the idea of classic Reed-Solomon erasure codes but has been thoroughly optimized for the realities of decentralized networks. In simple terms, data is split into two types of slices—main slices and secondary slices. Main slices are strictly governed by rules: with f+1 slices, data can be recovered, and 2f+1 node signatures ensure availability; secondary slices are generated through XOR operations to enhance fault tolerance.

What’s the advantage of this binary structure? Walrus can maintain a 4-5x replication factor and still quickly recover data even if two-thirds of the nodes fail. Comparing with traditional solutions: Filecoin's full replication scheme requires about 25x replication factor, while Arweave's entire network storage mode pushes replication costs to 100-1000x. This structured redundancy design allows Walrus to find a new balance among cost, performance, and fault tolerance, truly solving the longstanding issues of high computational complexity and overhead in erasure coding within decentralized environments.