Many people still simply categorize Walrus as "another decentralized storage," but if you look at its recent product iterations, you'll find the approach is completely different. The Walrus Foundation openly states in its annual summary: launching the mainnet is just the appetizer; the real competition is making developers use it as smoothly as Web2, treating privacy and verifiability as default system configurations rather than optional features.

What I want to discuss most is why this matters—ultimately because it addresses three real pain points for developers.

**First Pain Point: Access Control**

The Seal module seems simple but is actually very hardcore. It brings permission management to the data layer—your data can not only be encrypted but also execute rules on-chain, precisely controlling who can view, modify, and how to authorize. This is especially critical for sensitive information like AI training data, medical health records, and DeFi trading strategies. Compared to old methods like post-audit or centralized gateways, Seal makes privacy a hard constraint from the architecture level.

**Second Pain Point: Fragmented Storage**

It sounds contradictory, but many projects' real dilemma isn't storing large files but the "small file hell"—thousands of images, configuration files, UI resources scattered everywhere. Quilt's solution is native API packaging capability, allowing a single operation to aggregate up to 660 small files into one unit. The official reports that it has already helped ecosystem partners save over 3 million WAL in storage costs. These hard metrics are more convincing than any promotional words—real projects are using it, real money is being saved.

**Third Pain Point: Distribution and Mobile**

Upload Relay, combined with the new TypeScript SDK, abstracts away the complex operation of "distributing data across multiple nodes." This is especially beneficial for scenarios where mobile networks often drop connections and resume transfers are difficult. The improvements are particularly noticeable. More and more underlying protocols are starting to value this approach of "helping developers pay off technical debt."

**The Ecosystem Is Also Starting to Speak with Numbers**

Forecasts show that the prediction market application Myriad has already processed over $5 million in trading volume, with all data verification completed on Walrus. From a broader perspective, the prediction market sector itself has a daily trading volume of up to $2.3 billion—only infrastructure capable of handling this data volume can truly emerge.

**Token and Economic Model**

WAL is currently priced around $0.1563, with a 24-hour trading volume of approximately $18.27 million, circulating supply of about 1.6 billion tokens, and a max total supply of 5 billion. It has increased by 9.1% over the past 7 days. The "deflationary design" emphasized by the team is also noteworthy—each network transaction destroys a portion of tokens, so the more people use it, the greater the scarcity pressure.

**Final Observation**

For protocols like Walrus, I think the key isn't just "how good the story is," but whether the three aspects—privacy protection (Seal), cost optimization (Quilt), and user experience (Upload Relay)—can truly drive active daily users and paid usage. From this perspective, the recent product rhythm is indeed moving in the right direction.