SuperEx丨Sui Team Launches New Protocol Walrus, Aiming to Surpass Filecoin

By SuperEx

2 days ago

FIL

SUI

#SuperEx #Sui #Walrus

For many users, the name Mysten Labs may feel unfamiliar, but its flagship project — Sui — is well known in the crypto space. Mysten Labs successfully launched the Sui network and DeepBook protocol, attracting widespread attention across the global crypto market and establishing the team’s reputation.

In February 2025, Mysten Labs has introduced Walrus, a decentralized storage protocol that is entering its final countdown before the mainnet launch. This protocol is widely regarded as a direct challenge to established storage projects like Filecoin and Arweave, sparking deep discussions about its technical architecture and ecosystem integration.

Building on the market anticipation generated by Sui and DeepBook, Walrus immediately caught the industry’s attention upon its announcement. Although decentralized storage is a crowded sector, Walrus has stood out due to two key factors:

Cost Efficiency and Security — Walrus is more cost-effective and secure than existing storage solutions.
Programmability — It allows stored data to be programmatically managed through the Sui network.

Cost efficiency revolution

One of Walrus’ biggest competitive advantages is its cost efficiency, which far exceeds traditional decentralized storage solutions. Using Red-Stuff encoding technology, Walrus fragments data across the network while maintaining high availability with just a 4–5x replication factor, compared to Filecoin’s 100x and Arweave’s 500x replication factors. This design significantly reduces storage costs, enhances efficiency by nearly 100x, and minimizes data loss risks.

Storage cost comparison: For 1TB of data, Arweave’s annual storage cost is approximately $3,500, Filecoin’s cost ranges from $200 to $1,000, while Walrus requires only $50.

Dynamic scalability: As the number of nodes increases, Walrus’ storage costs further decrease, whereas Arweave’s costs increase with node growth.

This cost advantage makes Walrus an ideal choice for enterprise applications requiring frequent data access, such as AI model storage and gaming asset hosting.

Programmability: From static storage to dynamic interaction

The most significant distinction between Walrus and existing storage models is programmability.

Unlike traditional storage, which merely acts as a data warehouse, Walrus enables data programmability, making it a core innovation that disrupts conventional storage models. By deeply integrating with the Sui network’s smart contract system, Walrus enables decentralized storage that is programmable and functional.

NFT integrity: Walrus binds NFT metadata to on-chain objects, eliminating reliance on centralized storage for NFT attributes.
Dynamic data control: Smart contracts can directly interact with stored data, enabling actions such as automated data ownership transfers and triggering on-chain events. (Filecoin’s FVM virtual machine, in contrast, remains cumbersome for such operations.)
Enterprise-grade data management: Walrus allows users to delete or modify stored data, overcoming the immutability limitations of most blockchain storage solutions. (Only Blob data is deleted, on-chain transaction records remain intact.)

This feature gives Walrus unique advantages in fields such as finance and healthcare that require compliant data management. In contrast, due to the characteristic that data cannot be deleted, Filecoin and Arweave find it difficult to meet such requirements.

For smart contracts that directly reference or trigger data stored in decentralized storage, this feature opens up various possibilities:

Enhancing the functionality of decentralized applications: Smart contracts can directly access decentralized storage, enabling DApps to handle larger datasets, images, audio, and video files. This expands DApp use cases and enhances user experience.
Reducing reliance on on-chain storage: Traditionally, smart contract storage relies on expensive on-chain solutions. With Walrus, large data storage can be offloaded to decentralized storage, reducing costs and performance bottlenecks.
Ensuring data persistence and accessibility: Decentralized storage provides high redundancy and distributed backups, improving data persistence and fault tolerance.

Data access and deletion

Unlike Arweave, which does not allow data deletion, or Filecoin, where data is deleted only when contracts expire or storage nodes shut down, Walrus allows users to actively delete or modify data. This provides higher data control and flexibility.

Walrus and Sui’s symbiotic relationship: Ecosystem enablement and token economy restructuring

Sui Storage Fund and SUI Deflation MechanismSui solves long-term on-chain data storage challenges by introducing a storage fund mechanism:

When users pay storage fees, a portion of SUI tokens is permanently locked or burned, creating deflationary pressure.
Expanded SUI Utility — Each Walrus-stored Blob must create a metadata object on Sui, consuming SUI as gas fees.
Cross-Ecosystem Demand — Walrus is not limited to Sui; it can serve as a standalone storage layer for other blockchains (Celestia, EigenDA), driving external SUI demand.

If Walrus’ mainnet reaches 1EB (exabyte) of stored data, it would consume ~240 million SUI annually — 15% of the current circulating supply — potentially increasing SUI scarcity.

2. Technical Collaboration: Sui’s Full-Stack Infrastructure Ambition

Mysten Labs aims to build a comprehensive Web3 infrastructure stack covering execution, storage, and communication:

Execution Layer — Sui’s Mysticeti V2 consensus achieves sub-second transaction finality, enabling high-frequency financial transactions.
Storage Layer — Walrus handles large-scale unstructured data, reducing mainchain burden.
Communication Layer — SCION protocol integration enhances DDoS resistance and network stability.

This full-stack architecture allows Sui to support complex applications from DeFi to AI training, with Walrus serving as a critical piece in decentralized cloud computing.

Walrus is more than just a storage upgrade — it has the potential to accelerate the paradigm shift in Web3 infrastructure:

Developer experience transformation: Seamless integration with the Sui Move language enables one-stop smart contract development, data storage, and front-end deployment, reducing developer complexity.
Catalyst for enterprise adoption: Regulatory-compliant data deletion features encourage traditional enterprises to migrate sensitive data to decentralized storage, accelerating Web3 adoption beyond crypto-native applications.
Token valuation reassessment: Walrus adoption could elevate SUI’s role from a simple gas token to a full-stack ecosystem asset, significantly increasing its valuation ceiling.

If Walrus successfully fulfills its technical promises, 2025 could mark the shift from “capacity competition” to “functionality competition” in decentralized storage, positioning Sui as a top-tier blockchain ecosystem.

Conclusion

The competition between Walrus and Filecoin is not just about market share — it reflects two fundamentally different technological approaches:

Walrus focuses on extreme cost efficiency & functional integration.
Filecoin prioritizes scalability & first-mover advantage.

This rivalry will reshape the decentralized storage market and may redefine how blockchain infrastructure supports next-generation internet applications.

For investors, the key factors to watch are:

Walrus’ adoption rate post-mainnet launch.
Sui’s ecosystem synergy.
Whether 2025 marks the shift from “capacity wars” to “functionality wars” in decentralized storage.

If Walrus delivers on its promises, Sui could emerge as a top-tier blockchain ecosystem.

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