The standards for evaluating projects in the crypto space are now somewhat absurd. Look at the narratives circulating in the market—either greedy "hundredfold stories," or relying on "big institutional endorsements," or expecting "immediate surge upon listing." It seems that if a project can't tell a sufficiently shocking story within three minutes, it's immediately deemed a dead project.

Recently, after getting involved with Walrus, a storage protocol, I started to question this evaluation system.

First of all, there's nothing particularly special about Walrus itself. The concept of decentralized storage has been mainstream for a long time, the technology is just okay, nothing groundbreaking. The price performance is also quite average, even a bit quiet. According to the usual crypto market standards, this kind of project should have been sidelined long ago.

But the reality is, a group of users have started to get used to it, and are reluctant to switch to other solutions.

I know a developer who makes on-chain mini-games. Last year, to optimize Gas and storage costs, he tried four or five different solutions. In the end, he chose Walrus, and his reason was very simple: "After using it for a while, I got used to it. It hasn't made me worry about storage anymore."

He later used a more vivid analogy: "It's like a power socket. People who buy sockets don't research how the internal copper plates are made; they only care whether the power supply is stable."

This game has been online for nearly a year, and all user assets and transaction logs are stored there. I asked him if he considered migrating to other solutions. His reaction was: "Are you joking? Re-adapting code, migrating data, re-testing... I could develop two new features in the time it takes to do all that."

This "lazy to switch" attitude seems passive, but it actually reflects the core competitive advantage of a product—it's not won by stories, marketing, or short-term price stimulation, but by the seamless, stable, worry-free experience in daily use.

The less you want to think about it, the better it does.

This is completely different from projects that need to regularly generate buzz and release positive news to maintain hype. The growth model of protocols like Walrus is also entirely different—not through community hype or media blitzes, but through developer adoption. One developer decides to use it, then his friends might also use it, and then his project users indirectly rely on this storage layer. This kind of growth is sticky and invisible, but once it takes hold, the cost of migration becomes very high.

The current evaluation logic in the crypto space has a huge flaw—collectively falling into "hype myopia," completely blind to those that grow quietly, without stories or price fluctuations.

But infrastructure is like that. Truly great infrastructure is often the most unremarkable. You don't think about how amazing TCP is every day; it's because it works so perfectly.

Of course, this doesn't mean Walrus will necessarily become the next benchmark in infrastructure—just that true competitiveness might not look like what the crypto world expects. It won't make you rich overnight, but it will save you some mental energy in the dull daily grind to focus on what truly matters.

That's the direction I find worth observing.