The hardware competition in storage networks is becoming increasingly fierce. Just look at the situation of Filecoin miners—investing hundreds of thousands in computing clusters, making it impossible for most ordinary people to participate. What is the result of such high barriers to entry? The network is gradually monopolized by well-capitalized large miners, ultimately deviating from the original intention of decentralization.

But Walrus Protocol offers an alternative approach. It adopts the Red Stuff algorithm framework, whose core advantage is that—storage nodes almost do not need to perform complex proof-of-replication calculations. What does this mean? Old computers can be used, idle bandwidth can be utilized, and home NAS devices can also connect. The barrier to entry is significantly lowered.

From a certain perspective, this is what true decentralization should look like. When participating nodes are sufficiently dispersed and widespread, the network’s resistance to censorship and reliability will increase exponentially. Compared to storage solutions that rely on hardware arms races, the Walrus approach clearly aligns more with the essence of Web3—allowing ordinary people to also become part of the network.