Decentralized storage is currently a $9 billion sector in crypto. ⅔ of that $9 billion is dominated by 3 projects: ICP, Filecoin, and Arweave. It’s an important and fast-growing sector. After all, if your data and websites aren’t hosted in a decentralized way, then how decentralized is your application? Probably not very. And almost certainly not enough.
Decentralized storage is part of the core ethos of crypto. And now, there’s a new kid on the block ready to use its unique tech to make its mark. Meet the next generation of decentralized storage… with Walrus.
The State of Decentralized Storage
Right now, Filecoin and Arweave dominate the market. Filecoin dominates in NFT metadata storage, leveraging its integration with IPFS. And they have centralization issues at times, at the node level. See the X post below. Arweave dominates in file storage for things like running apps and websites.
Filecoin and IFPS still rely on centralized bootstrap nodes running on cloud servers.
We have more steps to take to a better internet – but we are getting there.
Most big files today are now stored as BLOBs. This includes media like images and video or multimedia types. Essentially, a blob is just a chunk of data that does not need to follow any sort of structure to be compatible with the storage solution. It’s also called unstructured data.
The BLOB is an object — BLOB stands for Binary Large Object. And if the BLOB itself is an object, then wouldn’t it make sense to get better access, security, and control using a language that works with objects already?
That’s what Walrus does and why it’s so novel in decentralized storage. It’s a real alternative to handling BLOBs and storage, aside from Solidity.
Introducing Walrus
Walrus is a new decentralized storage protocol, developed by the team behind Sui—Mysten Labs. The goal of Walrus is simple. Secure, reliable, inexpensive decentralized storage. They take advantage of blobs to store big files. The blobs are efficient for data storage. And especially so for blobs on Sui.
Why? Because, as we’ve mentioned in other videos, Sui uses the Move programming language. Move is an object-oriented language. It stores data as objects. It’s one of the things that makes Sui NFTs excel over the competition.
This makes accessing, securing, and using blobs easier. The blob is an object. Move works seamlessly with objects.
Built using Sui, Available to use by any Web3 Builder
Walrus is for everyone. Anyone including Ethereum and Solana builders can use Walrus as their storage solution.
Decentralized storage and AI
Wow, Walrus is so easy to work with!
In just two hours, I was able to do the following:
– Deploy a Walrus aggregator (downloader) and publisher (uploader) in 4 regions around the world w/geo-based routing on an internal private network.
– Deploy a caching layer cluster that has… pic.twitter.com/MtSgiceRxY
An interesting topic around decentralized storage is how AI can leverage it to operate in more interesting ways. A storage network like Walrus can act as an endless data set, which may be useful for certain AI use cases.
Walrus data can be accessed through APIs allowing developers to train AI models, such as large language models, which can be used to prompt and answer questions about data on Walrus.
While Walrus can be treated as a large training ground for AI protocols, it also is key to realizing truly decentralized AI protocols. AI systems can store and access data on walrus without relying on centralized servers or third-party providers. This independence ensures that it can operate in a self-sufficient and transparent way.
#Walrus isn’t just storage – it’s creating a whole new trust layer for data where provenance and decentralization matter most. pic.twitter.com/nMPvw8gKha
With decentralized storage, AI protocols can train models, process data, and make decisions all within a peer-to-peer ecosystem, ensuring that data ownership remains with the users and not with centralized entities.
Other News & How to Start Using Walrus
Others in the industry are noticing Walrus’s convenience and technical expertise. Akord, a company also focused on decentralized data storage, liked the Walrus offering so much that they are using it for their own data ownership and storage infrastructure. They moved from Arweave to Walrus to leverage the unique benefits provided. They also rebranded now to Tusky.
Welcome @AkordApp to the herd!
Akord, a secure storage and collaboration platform, is moving to Walrus Testnet soon.
This furthers Akord’s mission to empower users with meaningful data ownership, plus equips devs with an API to easily integrate Walrus into their projects! https://t.co/w33mbbtmTypic.twitter.com/5aT5MfZmym
Walrus is currently in testnet, which has only been active for a couple of weeks—so you are really early on this one. This is your chance to explore how well the system works and help report on any bugs. Here is a link to the testnet faucet to get some testnet WAL tokens to play around with.
Some of the cool things you can do when you test it are uploading your own data blob of less than 10MB or even creating a website with decentralized hosting. Instead of a dashboard backend like WordPress or Webflow, you get a dashboard that connects to your wallet. It’s pretty cool.
Give Walrus a try today. All you need is a Sui testnet wallet and some testnet SUI tokens. We recommend the Sui Wallet, which has this functionality built-in. Then go use the faucet and get some testnet tokens, and you are on your way to better data storage.
Disclaimer
The information discussed by Altcoin Buzz is not financial advice. This is for educational, entertainment and informational purposes only. Any information or strategies are thoughts and opinions relevant to accepted levels of risk tolerance of the writer/reviewers, and their risk tolerance may be different from yours.
We are not responsible for any losses that you may incur as a result of any investments directly or indirectly related to the information provided. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are high-risk investments, so please do your due diligence. This article has been sponsored by Sui.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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(@sourcenetwrk) November 5, 2024
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