Knowledge preservation concerns the continuation of human civilization. But the reality is quite harsh—libraries, universities, and research institutions struggle with the annual costs of storing digital archives, while also worrying about the risks of service providers going bankrupt or changing policies.

This is not a minor issue. Globally, research data generated each year amounts to several PBs. Raw data from particle colliders, star maps captured by telescopes, long-term biological gene monitoring records—these all need to be securely stored, possibly for decades before they can be used. The cost of traditional cloud storage? Too expensive to even calculate.

The distributed storage protocol Walrus Protocol aims to address this pain point. Its approach is: an extremely low fixed-cost model enables research institutions to plan digital preservation at a century scale, while on-chain notarization ensures data integrity and timestamp records. Scientific achievements gain an immutable notarization.

Digitalization of cultural heritage faces the same dilemma. Museums are digitizing precious artifacts, ancient books, and historical images at high resolution—these TB and even PB-level archives are shared human assets. War, disasters, and political factors can lead to data loss. The capabilities of distributed networks can mitigate these risks. Interestingly, combined with programmable storage functions, administrators can finely control access permissions: the general public views low-resolution versions, authorized scholars access original files, and all operations are recorded with on-chain audits.

What is the more ambitious vision? To build a permanent knowledge base distributed globally and maintained collectively by the community. Individuals and organizations can contribute storage backups at extremely low marginal costs for open-source code repositories, Wikipedia snapshots, environmental monitoring data, and other public datasets. Step by step, this constructs the digital foundation of human civilization.

This indeed transcends mere commercial considerations.