When it comes to Walrus, many people's first reaction is "Another decentralized storage project." There's some truth to that, but it's only half right.

To be honest, if you only understand Walrus as a storage solution, you're likely to misunderstand it. It's not just about the surface issue of "how to efficiently store data."

Walrus targets a core contradiction in the Web3 world that is often ignored but will eventually be exposed—if one day the smart contracts are still safely on the chain and the chain remains intact, but the data disappears, is this system still alive?

Think about how deeply we currently obsess over Web3—almost all trust is built on one assumption: the chain is eternal. Smart contracts are immutable, transaction history is clear and traceable, and on-chain states can be verified anytime and anywhere. This is the most touted technical foundation of Web3.

But when it comes to developing practical applications, problems arise. Dig a little deeper, and you'll hit a wall: truly valuable data almost never gets on-chain.

Images, long articles, videos, audio, AI model weights, complex structured data, historical snapshots... these core "content entities" are either stored in centralized cloud servers or dumped into semi-decentralized networks, relying on a bunch of invisible, unprovable assumptions to stay alive.

The result is quite awkward: on the surface, it advocates decentralization, but at its core, it's a system with a very poor memory. This issue isn't obvious in everyday operation because most projects simply don't take this risk seriously.