Walrus Labs Raises $140M to Disrupt the Decentralized Storage Market

The decentralized storage protocol Walrus recently completed a financing of US$140 million.

Author: Frank, PANews

The decentralized storage protocol Walrus has recently completed a financing of $140 million. This round of financing was led by Standard Crypto, with participation from institutions such as a16z crypto and Electric Capital. With an emphasis on technological innovation, this capital injection into an old-generation on-chain project renders it the largest financing amount in recent times.

As the decentralized storage protocol developed by the Sui chain team Mysten Labs, Walrus aims to provide efficient and reliable storage solutions for large files and unstructured data. It is built on the Sui blockchain and leverages error correction code (erasure coding) technology to achieve a replication factor of 4~5, reducing storage costs by 80-100 times compared to protocols like Filecoin and Arweave.

In the present market environment, such a huge financing amount may be difficult to obtain with just the narrative of technological innovation. Another reason for Walrus's large-scale financing is that it comes from Mysten Labs. As the development team of the Sui network, Mysten Labs completed a financing amount of US$336 million before the launch of the Sui network. The lead investor of Walrus, Standard Crypto, as well as institutions such as a16z crypto and Electric Capital, have also appeared on the list of investors of Sui.

According to the statement when Walrus was launched, it can be seen that the launch of Walrus originated from the need to upgrade the storage problem of Sui network. After Walrus went online, it reduced the storage pressure of Sui network by providing efficient decentralized storage solutions.

In addition, according to SuperEx's report, each blob stored by Walrus needs to create a metadata object on Sui, which consumes SUI tokens as gas fees. If Walrus usage increases to 1EB (exabyte), it is estimated that about 240 million SUI (15% of the current circulation) may be consumed each year, indirectly affecting the network economy. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Filecoin's total storage capacity will be about 4.2EB.

Mysten Labs also announced in March that it had acquired Parasol, a Web3 gaming infrastructure startup. Combined with the performance improvement of Walrus, Sui Network may focus on AI and gaming next.

This massive influx of capital seems to remind the market that decentralized storage is still a market with potential. According to a report by Codex.Storage in December 2024, the decentralized storage market will see further market expansion in 2025 as AI expands and more and more companies adopt hybrid cloud.

$80 million worth of airdrops have been distributed via NFT

The huge amount of financing also makes the market believe that Walrus may become another major airdrop. WAL is the native token of Walrus, with a maximum supply of 5 billion and an initial circulation supply of 1.25 billion. Walrus' official announcement shows that more than 60% of WAL will be used for the community. But a careful study shows that this does not mean that the initial airdrop ratio will be high. It is reported that a total of 10% of the tokens will be used for user airdrops, of which 4% will be allocated before the mainnet is launched, and 6% will be allocated after the mainnet is launched. In addition, 43% of the tokens are used for community reserves. This part of the funds is used for the long-term development and growth of the Walrus ecosystem, including community funding and planning, developer support, Walrus core research, incentive programs, community activities, hackathons and other ecological projects. It is managed by the Walrus Foundation and the mainnet is expected to be launched on March 27.

Investors will receive a total of 7% of the shares, which will be unlocked 12 months after the mainnet is launched. Based on the calculation that the 7% token share corresponds to the $140 million financing, the cost of a single WAL obtained by investors is about $0.4. The valuation of WAL has reached $2 billion, compared to the current full circulation market value of Filecoin, which is about $6 billion.

Currently, 4% of the tokens before the mainnet launch have been distributed to users participating in the testnet in the form of NFTs, and the remaining 6% of the airdrop shares will be distributed through community incentives and ecological participation after the launch.

While the Web3 world is still exploring the ultimate form of the storage track, Walrus has opened up a new path with the technical combination of "error correction code + low replication factor". This is not only a revolution in storage costs, but also a paradigm breakthrough in the self-iteration of the Sui ecosystem - by converting storage consumption into an economic engine for SUI tokens, Walrus is weaving a multi