Treat the decentralized storage market as an endless "Deep Sea Infrastructure," and Walrus is like the most deeply submerged and most ambitious player in the 2026 competition. It aims to build a super warehouse within the fertile Sui ecosystem that can store all human digital assets. But there's a crucial issue investors must understand—what truly threatens life in the deep sea is often not the visible physical pressure, but whether the economic mechanism that sustains the entire system is stable or not.

Looking back from the beginning of 2026, WAL's performance this year has been impressive, and market enthusiasm for it is high. However, the story behind the token is far from simple; it's not just a straightforward "I store data, you pay" situation. Before truly participating, it's recommended that everyone understand three hidden risk points embedded deep in the code and incentive mechanisms.

First is the "redundancy cost" issue of erasure coding technology. Walrus's core competitiveness lies here—it can cut and fragment original data into pieces, and only a subset needs to be recovered to restore the entire data. For example: tearing a book into 10,000 pieces, and being able to reconstruct it by assembling just 2,000 of those pieces. It sounds wonderful and cost-effective, but the hidden danger is that collusion among nodes can easily form, and low-quality nodes are more likely to infiltrate.

Specifically, at the data layer, according to on-chain statistics from December 2025, as storage scales up to petabyte levels, the disconnection of non-professional nodes in the Walrus network has begun to worsen. Especially during market volatility and downturns, this problem will be amplified. Once electricity costs surpass expected returns, a large number of nodes may collectively disappear.