By early 2026, we are witnessing a subtle yet crucial shift in blockchain infrastructure.

Developers are gradually realizing a problem: simply stacking performance on the execution layer is no longer enough. What they need is stable, inexpensive, truly reliable storage. This perfectly aligns with the opportunity presented by the Walrus protocol.

In the Sui ecosystem and even across cross-chain developer communities, Walrus is rapidly becoming the mainstream choice. It’s not just a storage network—by utilizing erasure coding and distributed blob mechanisms, it provides a truly censorship-resistant,永不消失 data infrastructure. What does this mean for those running AI, gaming, or social applications on-chain? It means you can permanently store massive datasets, dynamic media, and user content at low cost, without fear of server crashes or being kicked off.

Where is Walrus’s core competitive advantage? Resource efficiency. Traditional decentralized storage is often bogged down by high redundancy and slow recovery. Walrus’s "RedStuff" design takes a different approach, intelligently sharding large files. Even if network nodes go up and down, data availability remains robust. Calculations show that storage costs are far lower than centralized cloud services, and recovery speed rivals or even surpasses AWS.

After all this, the real proof is in practical cases. Recently, realtbook chose Walrus to permanently host all artworks and metadata of the Bookie NFT collection. This is not a small backup redundancy move, but a decisive step away from centralized servers. All content is stored on-chain as blobs, bidding farewell to centralized services forever.