Walrus faces a seemingly simple dilemma, but the core is quite painful: few applications lead to fewer nodes, and fewer nodes scare away applications. This is a classic infrastructure cold start paradox.

How bad is the current situation? Flatlander, as a main use case, has gone live, with an estimated daily active users not exceeding 5,000. Community data is even more disheartening—the total daily Blob creation across the network is less than 2,000, with 70% coming from testnets or internal tools. In other words, requests generated by real users are almost negligible.

This directly cuts into node revenue. At the current FROST fee rate, operating a 1TB node earns less than $3 per month. Compare that to the returns from running a lightweight Ethereum node or participating in a 5G network, which are more lucrative and stable. Rational miners have long since moved elsewhere.

Even more painful is the backlash effect caused by this approach. Insufficient node density directly degrades application experience: uploading a 5MB video takes 8 seconds, and 15% of cold data after 90 days cannot be recovered. Seeing these numbers, developers naturally run to Pinata + some decentralized storage network—despite the centralization risks, it offers faster speed, stable experience, and lower costs.

Mysten Labs is indeed subsidizing early users with ecosystem funds, but this is only a blood transfusion, not a self-sustaining model. Once subsidies end, those projects are very likely to switch storage solutions due to cost or performance issues.

The Walrus team may still be waiting for a "killer app," but history has already provided an answer: infrastructure rarely depends on a single application to turn things around. Filecoin rose on the NFT boom, Arweave captured the demand for permanent storage in academia, and Storj found a business partner like Cloudflare. What about Walrus? So far, no clear vertical breakthrough has been identified. The creator economy is not deeply cultivated, enterprise notarization is not penetrated, and compatibility with some mainstream social protocols is also problematic.

Without a clear adoption path, Walrus may remain stuck in a vicious cycle of "technically solid but ecologically barren" for a long time.