Someone asked me what Walrus is for. At first, I was a bit stumped—I don’t mean I didn’t understand, but when the other person mentioned words like "decentralized storage," "blob," and "erasure coding," they basically started to zone out.

Later, I approached it from a different angle, and I explained it more smoothly. I told him that you can think of Walrus as the "backend hard drive system" in the Web3 world. The difference is, this hard drive doesn’t belong exclusively to a single company but is maintained collectively by the entire network.

This analogy is actually quite fitting. Many on-chain applications we use seem highly decentralized, but in reality, a large amount of images, videos, and various data still reside on traditional servers. If a server encounters issues, the application experience immediately collapses. The core pain point this project aims to solve is how to carry the "off-chain data" in a more robust and risk-resistant way. It’s not a tool to help you make money, but rather to ensure that the things you rely on won’t suddenly disappear.

From this perspective, many previously incomprehensible design logic becomes clear. Why isn’t it eager to promote "everyone to store data"? Instead, it focuses more on stability and cost structure. Because the real demand comes from long-term operational application teams—they care most about whether the system can run today and still run tomorrow, not flashy features.

This also made me realize that Walrus’s competitors are not a specific project, but rather the traditional centralized cloud service systems.