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Walrus is an upcoming decentralized-storage platform from Sui developer Mysten Labs that will offer programmable file storage for the gaming-focused L1 Sui, as well as devs on Solana, Ethereum, or other chains that also want to use it.
Walrus is designed for large binary files, or “blobs.” Right now, there’s 833.33 TB in total storage available, with about 78,890 GB currently being used across more than 4.5 million blobs, according to Walruscan.
That means Walrus could store videos, images, PDFs, or other files, as well as apps. Walrus uses Sui smart contracts to make those blobs programmable.
Flatlander is one of the early projects using Walrus. Flatlander is an imaginary world concept with NFTs; their site is being hosted on Sui, and all site resources are being loaded from Walrus.
The Walrus mainnet will launch next week on March 27. The team has also released their tokenomics for the WAL token.
The upcoming data storage chain uses delegated proof of stake, and it consists of storage nodes that will have to compete with each other to offer competitive pricing for file storage.
Walrus has just raised $140 million in funding from a round led by Standard Crypto.
Could Walrus be good for blockchain gaming or art? I think so.
One of the primary appeals of crypto is that it’s supposed to be decentralized. That’s a term that gets thrown around a lot, but it’s supposed to mean that the underlying infrastructure that supports a token’s existence — including the chain itself — is owned and operated by many different people around the world. Therefore, a decentralized chain is difficult to censor via shutdowns if there are enough participants owning a small share of the nodes.
As we know, NFTs themselves aren’t technically the art you see but the underlying tokens and data tied to them. The visual data of an NFT is metadata that can be changed by the creator.
That metadata can be stored on centralized platforms like AWS — or IPFS, a decentralized solution. More options aren’t a bad thing, though we don’t know yet how decentralized Walrus will ultimately become.
“Today the majority of decentralized apps rely on traditional web hosting to serve their front ends and client side code, which offers poor integrity and availability. Decentralized stores may be used to serve web and dApps content directly while ensuring its integrity and availability,” the Walrus whitepaper reads.
Mysten Labs believes Walrus is faster, more affordable, and more robust than the competition.
“There’s absolutely a world where games on Sui use Walrus for a wide variety of possibilities,” Mysten Labs Head of Communications Lexi Wangler told me.
TBD on whether it’ll make sense to store an entire game’s assets onchain. We’ve already seen a few games that are almost 100% onchain (like Pirate Nation), but it would be cool if a more graphically-complex game could run more game components onchain, too.
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