You often hear public chain projects boasting about their TPS in the community, but few dare to face an awkward fact— the faster the chain runs, the more terrifying the accumulation of historical data becomes. Where do these data (State History) go? Essentially, there are only two options: one is to secretly delete old data, like Ethereum's proposed EIP-4444; the other is to hand it over to centralized cloud service providers. And what’s the result? The so-called "full nodes" have long become ornaments.

The irony here is that more and more high-performance public chains (Solana, Monad, Aptos, etc.) are aggressively increasing TPS, but who will solve the data storage crisis? No one. Until Walrus appeared.

Don’t be fooled by the unfamiliar name Walrus; its ambition is actually huge— to create the "decentralized archive" for the entire blockchain world. It’s not just a storage platform for users to store a few images, but a true infrastructure to offload the "historical burden" from public chains themselves.

Imagine this scenario: a certain chain’s ledger expands to the point where it can’t fit on a hard drive, and validation nodes are forced to only keep the latest state. At this point, old transaction records from years ago can be packaged into data blocks and uploaded into Walrus’s network for permanent archiving. The benefits are obvious—nodes can stay "light," greatly improving network efficiency. More importantly, based on erasure coding mechanisms, any new node wanting to trace back historical data can recover it from this decentralized storage pool at low cost.

This not only solves the scalability dilemma of public chains but also takes data sovereignty back from centralized cloud providers. To some extent, this is the puzzle piece that Web3 has been missing for a long time.