Many people see Walrus as just an on-chain cloud storage, but that's a shallow understanding. The logic of cloud storage is simple and crude—just shove the data in and it's done. Walrus aims to do much more.

The truly valuable aspect is not "storing things in multiple places," but transforming data into usable assets. Assets that can be referenced by other applications, verified for authenticity, priced, authorized, and even support conditional revocation. This is the key.

I've analyzed on-chain projects myself and encountered quite awkward situations—many applications loudly proclaim "We are on-chain," but their core data is all stored off-chain, and they can switch it out at will. If you ask how they prove the content hasn't been tampered with, they either dodge the question or throw out a "There's a signature." Signatures are indeed useful, but they are hard to turn into reusable, general capabilities. As a result, each project has to develop its own verification logic, which becomes increasingly complex, and security relies entirely on self-discipline.

Walrus's approach is different. It aims to make "content + verification" into infrastructure. Upload a large dataset, and what you get is not a fragile, drifting link, but a standard object that can be reliably referenced. On-chain contracts don't need to embed all data into state, but at least can anchor the referenced data as the confirmed data. This step is actually very critical—it makes data truly verifiable, traceable, and recognized by protocols as an asset for the first time.

Following this logic further, if data can be used as an asset... the potential for imagination is enormous.