Decentralized storage often struggles with a trade-off between replication costs, recovery speed, and security. Walrus, a new system deployed in production, introduces “Red Stuff,” a two-dimensional erasure-coding protocol that achieves high security with just a 4.5x replication factor.
What makes this particularly impressive is its self-healing capability, which allows recovery without centralized coordination and with bandwidth proportional only to the lost data. This design is crucial for efficiency in high-churn environments.
Furthermore, Walrus implements a multi-stage epoch-change protocol to handle storage node churn seamlessly, maintaining uninterrupted availability during committee transitions. This paper provides a deep dive into the engineering choices and novel algorithms that make resilient decentralized storage a reality.











