In the decentralized storage community, there's always a newbie developer with shining eyes asking: "Can I directly migrate my entire video streaming website to Walrus Protocol?"

My answer is: technically yes, but your user experience will collapse.

Walrus Protocol is insanely cheap, and security is top-notch, but there's a practical issue — it’s essentially a global "cold storage" network, not a millisecond-response "hot distribution" system. Decentralization comes at a cost: one word — slow.

When you download images from a major cloud service (like AWS S3), the request travels through fiber optic cables dozens of kilometers, flying from the nearest server straight to your phone. The whole process is smooth.

On the other hand, with Walrus? The situation is completely different. Your client needs to search globally for nodes holding data slices, establish connections, download fragments one by one, and then piece them together like building blocks at home to restore the complete file. This process involves massive network handshakes and local computations.

I’ve actually measured the first byte time (TTFB), which generally starts at a few hundred milliseconds, sometimes longer. For cold backups, that’s no problem. But if you’re loading webpage banners or short video thumbnails? Users will see that maddening spinning circle. In an era where user attention span is only 3 seconds, lagging isn’t deadly.

Commercial CDNs are fierce because they deploy tens of thousands of edge nodes worldwide for caching. Walrus hasn’t yet built such a caching ecosystem. This isn’t a technical issue; it’s an architectural difference.

So don’t misunderstand — Walrus Protocol is indeed a神器 for cold storage, backups, and archives. But if you want to use it to support high-frequency applications for ordinary users, you’d better be prepared for potential chain drops at this stage.