Looking solely at the secondary market performance, Walrus indeed appears somewhat lukewarm—slow pace, low enthusiasm, and few discussions. But if you look at it from a different perspective, considering the role it plays within the entire system, you'll understand why this project never aimed for short-term gains from the start.

The key lies in its underlying positioning. Walrus is not greedy; it doesn't try to cover storage, computation, and indexing all at once. Instead, it focuses on solving a very specific problem: when data isn't suitable for direct on-chain storage, how can smart contracts on the chain still trust the authenticity and integrity of that data? It may sound not "sexy," but this is precisely the practical bottleneck that high-performance public chains must overcome when entering the stage of real-world applications.

Within the entire Sui ecosystem, this design makes particular sense. Sui's inherent advantages in high concurrency and its object model are naturally suited for running complex applications, which inevitably generate large amounts of off-chain data. Historical states, user behavior records, content data, AI model outputs—these things simply can't all be stored on-chain. Walrus essentially paves the way in advance, preparing a verifiable data layer for the future, rather than waiting for problems to surface and scrambling to solve them.

Looking at the development pace, you can see a different approach. The project clearly follows an infrastructure logic: first enabling developers to use it stably, and as the ecosystem applications become more complex and dependencies naturally form, the market's understanding will catch up. Such infrastructure projects often have a low profile initially, but once they become a standard part of the ecosystem, they are hard to replace.

So, when evaluating such projects now, instead of focusing on short-term price fluctuations, it's better to understand them within the entire dependency chain of the system. Value realization may take time, but once dependencies are established, the long-term potential is usually substantial.