Produced by the Sui development team, an independent PoS chain, new governance token WAL, potential airdrop opportunities
Author: Alex Liu, Foresight News
The decentralized storage network Arweave has launched the computing layer AO, which has successfully led to the return of AR coin price, ecosystem, and popularity, making a remarkable comeback. As a general-purpose computing chain, what kind of waves will Sui create with the launch of the decentralized storage network Walrus?
Background
Team
The development company behind Solana is called Solana Labs, the one behind Aptos is called Aptos Labs, and the one behind Sui is Mysten Labs (that's how unique they are). Most of the founders and employees of Mysten Labs come from the blockchain project Diem, which was dissolved by Facebook (now Meta).
Walrus is the latest product classified as "protocol, platform" by Mysten Labs, and it is a decentralized storage network. The name "Walrus" in English means "walrus," and its official website conveys the reliability and availability of the protocol as a storage system with slogans like "thriving like a walrus" and "adaptable like a walrus."
Connection with Sui
Walrus is built on Sui and utilizes Sui to coordinate the sale of storage space and metadata. However, using Walrus does not require building applications or products on Sui, and the new governance token WAL will serve as a utility token, rather than SUI.
Competitive Comparison
Decentralized storage protocols are generally divided into two categories. The first category is fully replicated systems, with Filecoin and Arweave being typical representatives of this type. The main advantage of this type is the availability of complete files on storage nodes, allowing easy access and migration of files even if a storage node goes offline. This setup creates a permissionless environment because storage nodes do not need to rely on each other to recover files.
The reliability of these systems depends on the robustness of the selected storage nodes. Under the classic one-third static adversary model and the assumption of an infinite pool of candidate storage nodes, achieving a security level of "twelve nines" (i.e., the probability of losing file access is less than 10^-12) requires storing over 25 copies on the network, leading to 25 times the storage overhead. Additionally, there is the potential issue of a Sybil attack, where malicious actors can pretend to store multiple copies of a file, undermining the integrity of the system.
The second type of decentralized storage service uses Reed-Solomon (RS) coding. RS coding divides files into smaller parts called slices, with each slice representing a portion of the original file. As long as the total size of the slices is larger than the original file, the original file can be decoded. RS coding also has its drawbacks. The encoding and decoding processes rely on field operations, polynomial evaluation, and interpolation, which incur significant computational costs. These operations are practical only when the size of the field and the number of slices are relatively small, limiting the size of encoded files and the number of participating storage nodes. Otherwise, the cost of encoding becomes very high, restricting the level of decentralization. Another issue is that when a storage node goes offline and needs to be replaced by another node, unlike fully replicated systems, data cannot simply be copied from one node to another. RS coding systems require all existing storage nodes to send their slices to the replacement node, which then reconstructs the lost slices. However, this process results in O(|blob|) data transmission over the network. Frequent recovery operations reduce the storage savings obtained by reducing replication.
Challenges in Storage
Regardless of the replication protocol used, all existing decentralized storage systems face two additional challenges:
- Continuous challenges are needed to ensure that storage nodes retain data and do not discard it. In an open decentralized system that provides storage payments, this is crucial, but the current approach limits the scalability of the system because each file requires individual challenges.
- Storage nodes need coordination: they need to know who is in the system, which files have paid storage fees, implement participation incentive mechanisms, manage challenges, and mitigate abuse. This is why each of the above systems has implemented a custom blockchain to execute transactions and introduced cryptocurrencies outside the storage protocol.
Core Innovation
Given these challenges, what innovations does Walrus bring to decentralized storage?
In simple terms:
By adopting innovative erasure coding technology, Walrus can quickly and robustly encode unstructured data blocks into smaller shards, which are distributed and stored in a network of storage nodes. Even if up to two-thirds of the shards are lost, the original data block can be quickly reconstructed using partial shards. This is made possible with a replication factor of only 4 to 5 times, comparable to existing cloud services, and with the advantage of decentralization and broader fault tolerance.
Specifically:
Walrus has introduced RedStuff, a new 2D coding algorithm designed for Byzantine Fault Tolerance. RedStuff is based on fountain codes, combining fast operations and high reliability.
RedStuff encodes data into primary and secondary shards through simple operations, mainly XOR operations. These shards are distributed among storage nodes, with each node holding a unique combination. For different dimensions of coding, RedStuff uses different thresholds. The primary dimension uses an f+1 recovery threshold, allowing asynchronous writing, as only 2f+1 signatures are needed to prove the availability of data blocks, resulting in a 3 times replication factor.
The secondary dimension uses a 2f+1 recovery threshold, which achieves asynchronous storage proof for the first time while introducing only 1.5 times additional replication, resulting in a total replication factor of less than 5 times. More importantly, lost shards can be recovered based on the amount of lost data, saving bandwidth, all thanks to 2D coding.
The advantages of RedStuff include: faster encoding/decoding speed compared to RS coding due to the use of simple XOR operations; the system can scale to hundreds of nodes due to low storage overhead, with high elasticity and fault tolerance, ensuring data recovery even in the event of Byzantine failures.
As a permissionless protocol, Walrus is equipped with an efficient committee reconfiguration protocol to address the natural attrition of storage nodes, ensuring the continuous availability of data. When a new committee replaces the current committee between two epochs, the reconfiguration protocol ensures that all data blocks that have exceeded the point of availability (PoA) remain available. RedStuff's 2D coding makes state migration more efficient, allowing other nodes to recover lost shards even when some nodes are unavailable.
Node 1 and node 3 help node 4 recover shard data
Walrus has introduced an asynchronous challenge protocol to verify that nodes are storing data correctly. This protocol allows for efficient storage proofs, ensuring data availability without relying on network assumptions, with costs scaling logarithmically with the number of stored files.
Walrus's economic model is based on staking, combined with reward and penalty mechanisms. The innovative storage authentication mechanism reduces the cost of proving file storage, scaling logarithmically with the number of stored files.
In summary, Walrus, with the RedStuff protocol at its core, provides a scalable, resilient, and economically viable decentralized storage solution, offering high authenticity, integrity, auditability, and availability at a reasonable cost.
And all of this is made possible by Sui as the control layer for Walrus. Having a scalable, programmable, and secure infrastructure as a coordination layer allows it to focus on the core issues of decentralized storage.
Potential Airdrop
Walrus will launch its independent token WAL, which has utility for staking, governance, and more. How can one obtain the WAL airdrop? Similar to the method of obtaining AO, holding SUI may be one way to do so.
Walrus is expected to launch its testnet soon, with the mainnet launch date to be determined. For now, you can visit the official documentation to learn how to deploy your own website using Walrus.
Sources:
Walrus Whitepaper:
https://docs.walrus.site/walrus.pdf
Walrus: Decentralized Storage and DA Protocol, L2 and Large-Scale Storage Built on Sui: https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/63040
Mysten Labs Researcher X Thread:
https://x.com/LefKok/status/1836868240666153293
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