Recently, there's an interesting development: many people look at Walrus Protocol with old-school thinking—mainly decentralized storage, launching NFTs, and watching market fluctuations. But in reality, this project’s ambitions are much greater.

Its fundamental goal is not just a simple cloud drive, but to transform "data" from static attachments into a productive element that can be directly called by smart contracts, audited, clearly priced, and flexibly licensed. This is the key.

Since the mainnet launched last year, the team has been working on one thing—completing the final pieces needed for scalable application deployment. What exactly does that include? First, making the developer experience smooth; second, significantly reducing the cost of small files (which is very practical); third, making privacy and access control out-of-the-box default capabilities. They clearly stated in their annual review—by 2026, they have three goals: make the entire system as user-friendly as Web2 tools, treat privacy as a default setting, and deeply integrate with Sui’s development experience.

Now, how to participate in this ecosystem? There are actually multiple paths.

The most popular is the Builder route. Think about it—Walrus’s core selling point is "programmable storage." Data isn’t just casually thrown off-chain. Its process is as follows: first, generate a "storage resource" on Sui that can be referenced by contracts; then, encode the data using Red Stuff technology, slicing it into fragments, and distribute them to committee nodes. Finally, once more than 2/3 of signatures required by the protocol are collected, the entire storage becomes active. Under this mechanism, application developers naturally have an advantage.

If your product can fully leverage this programmable storage feature—making data not just stored, but actively callable, subject to regulatory review, and precisely priced—that’s when Walrus’s potential is truly unleashed. This is much more valuable than simply providing storage space.