In most decentralized storage systems today, storage still works a lot like traditional infrastructure: you trust a node or service to tell you, “Yes, your data is still here.” If that node lies, goes offline, or quietly stops storing the file, your application breaks—and there’s often no immediate way to detect or prevent it.
Walrus takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of trusting storage providers, Walrus requires cryptographic and network-level verification that data is actually being stored. Storage nodes must continuously prove that they are holding the data they committed to store. Availability is not assumed—it is measured and verified by the network itself.
This verification directly affects incentives. Nodes that successfully demonstrate data availability are rewarded. Nodes that fail to do so can be denied rewards or penalized. In Walrus, storage reliability is enforced by economics and verification, not reputation or promises.
This matters deeply for Web3 applications. Games, NFTs, AI models, datasets, and decentralized websites all depend on persistent access to data. If a game asset disappears, an NFT loses its media, or an AI dataset becomes unavailable, the application simply stops working.
Walrus turns data availability into a service guarantee that can be proven. Rather than hoping data is still there, Web3 applications can rely on a storage layer where availability is continuously verified by the network. This makes Walrus a critical foundation for building reliable, production-grade Web3 apps.
