• Computer Science > Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [Submitted on 8 May 2025 (v1), last revised 20 Feb 2026 (this version, v3)] Title:Walrus: An Efficient Decentralized Storage Network View PDFAbstract:Decentralized storage systems face a fundamental trade-off between replication overhead, recovery efficiency, and security guarantees. • Current approaches either rely on full replication, incurring substantial storage costs, or employ trivial erasure coding schemes that struggle with efficient recovery especially under high storage-node churn. • We present Walrus, a novel decentralized blob storage system that addresses these limitations through multiple technical innovations. • At the core of Walrus is RedStuff, a two-dimensional erasure coding protocol that achieves high security with only 4.5x replication factor, while enabling self-healing recovery that requires bandwidth proportional to only the lost data $(O(|blob|/n)$ versus $O(|blob|)$ in traditional systems). • Crucially, RedStuff is the first protocol to support storage challenges in asynchronous networks, preventing adversaries from exploiting network delays to pass verification without actually storing data. • Walrus also introduces a novel multi-stage epoch change protocol that efficiently handles storage node churn while maintaining uninterrupted availability during committee transitions.
Article Summaries:
- Walrus: Efficient Decentralized Storage Network
Researchers have introduced Walrus, a decentralized blob‑storage system that balances replication cost, recovery speed, and security. Its core, the RedStuff erasure‑coding protocol, achieves high data integrity with only a 4.5× replication factor and enables self‑healing recovery that uses bandwidth proportional to the lost data (O(|blob|/n)) rather than the full blob size. RedStuff also supports storage‑challenge verification in asynchronous networks, preventing attackers from exploiting delays. Walrus adds a multi‑stage epoch‑change protocol to manage node churn without downtime and incorporates authenticated data structures to guard against malicious clients. Benchmarks indicate practical performance at scale, making it suitable for high‑integrity decentralized applications.
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