Decentralized storage has always been plagued by an irreconcilable contradiction: choosing high-security, expensive solutions or accepting low-cost, risk-laden compromises. Filecoin guarantees data security with over 25 times replication factor, but as a result, storage costs soar; Arweave pursues permanent storage, with full network redundancy leading to costs that are 100 times those of Walrus—none of these are sustainable long-term solutions.

The emergence of the Walrus protocol changes the game. Its self-developed RedStuff encoding technology represents a structural breakthrough, balancing cost, security, and flexibility.

**The technical solution is as follows:** RedStuff encoding is based on the classic Reed-Solomon erasure code but has been thoroughly reconstructed to suit the realities of decentralized networks. Data is split into two parts: primary slices and secondary slices. Primary slices require an f+1 recovery threshold and need signatures from 2f+1 nodes to ensure availability; secondary slices are generated via XOR operations, providing fault tolerance buffer, so even if two-thirds of nodes go offline, data can still be quickly restored.

The power of this binary structure is that—only 4-5 times replication factor is needed to achieve the security level of traditional schemes with 25 times replication. 1TB of data costs only $50 per year, far below traditional cloud services. Storage efficiency is improved by 100 times compared to Arweave.

**From an actual application perspective,** Walrus’s advantages are even more apparent. Arweave’s permanent storage setup becomes a bottleneck—enterprise applications often require data deletion, which it simply cannot support. While Filecoin offers low-cost options, reliability is often compromised. Walrus strikes a balance between these two dimensions, offering both practicality and cost competitiveness.