What is the biggest headache for friends in cross-border e-commerce? Traditional cloud storage is both expensive and subject to censorship restrictions. Recently, I talked with friends in e-commerce about Walrus, and we decided to try it out together. The result was quite interesting.

This system uses erasure coding technology, which is truly impressive. A combination of 10 data blocks and 4 parity blocks means that even if 4 data blocks are lost, the data can still be fully recovered. This saves a significant amount of storage space compared to traditional solutions that simply duplicate data. We tested with a batch of product images and logistics data. Blob storage automatically splits large files for distributed sending. Upload speeds are much faster than expected, and transaction fees are so low they can be almost ignored.

If you hold WAL tokens, you can also get discounts on storage fees, which is a real incentive. The system runs on the Sui chain, with metadata and governance maintained on the main chain. Storage tasks are assigned separately to nodes for processing, which doesn’t consume resources from Sui validators. This architecture design is quite clever.

Now, this friend has migrated some non-real-time data over. His evaluation is that it can resist censorship and reduce costs at the same time. The practical value of WAL is the core that makes it promising in the long run.