$WAL in the decentralized storage sector is most attractive to me not because of those high-level technical terms, but because of its obsession with developer experience. Recently, I spent time using its toolchain to build a few small projects, and the smoothness it offers is truly unmatched by other storage protocols. Today, from the perspective of actual coding, let's discuss why this set of tools and ecosystem is worth paying attention to.

Let's start with the command-line tool. You might ask, what's there to say about CLI? But Walrus's binary design approach really has some insights. In comparison, IPFS requires starting a daemon process first, Arweave also involves messing around with wallet and key configurations, while Walrus is straightforward—just download a binary, and with a simple command like walrus store, you can upload files to the decentralized network and immediately get back a blob ID. The entire process has no unnecessary steps.

This CLI not only supports single-file uploads. You can perform batch operations using wildcards, for example, walrus store images/*.png will process all images in a directory at once, with each file returning its own blob ID independently. I’ve seen teams migrate from some leading storage solutions by writing a shell script that loops through this CLI, processing several terabytes of data in an afternoon—such practicality is highly attractive for production environments.

Another detail is the epoch management mechanism. When storing data, you can specify the storage duration, which is especially helpful for cost optimization. Different business scenarios have different data lifecycle needs, and being able to set this flexibly rather than being forced into a lock-in is a design that truly aligns with real-world requirements.