Currently, discussions about decentralized storage protocols usually focus on capacity and cost comparisons—treating them as purely cheap warehouses. But this misses what the next-generation protocols truly aim to achieve.

Projects like Walrus are far more ambitious than just storage. Their goal is to transform passive data accumulation into a "programmable data availability and computation layer." In simple terms, data should not only be stored and retrieved but also capable of lightweight, trustful, and efficient local computation right where the data resides. This is the key to unlocking value.

How is this technically achieved? The core lies in the deep integration of Walrus with Sui smart contracts. Here, data is not a static binary string but a "programmable object" that can be packaged with verification metadata and directly invoked by Move contracts. In other words, you can layer business logic on top of the data.

A practical example: a machine learning training dataset stored on Walrus can be bound to a smart contract. This contract specifies access permissions and micro-payment rules. AI engineers no longer need to download all the data; after payment, they can directly send tasks to edge nodes in the network, with storage nodes performing nearby computations and only returning the final results. This creates an integrated storage and computation prototype.

This will fundamentally change the way data economy operates. The economic design of the WAL token will evolve from a simple "storage fee" model to a three-dimensional model of "storage rent + computation fuel + result verification deposit." The role of storage nodes will no longer be passive warehouses but will be upgraded to dual providers of storage and computation. This marks a paradigm shift.