‘All to Play For’: Walrus Hits 450TB of Data Stored Amid Renewed AI Push

Walrus celebrates its one-year anniversary on March 27, ending 12 months in which it has achieved many significant milestones.

Launched by Sui developer Mysten Labs, the decentralized data storage layer went live barely a week after the Walrus Foundation has raised $140 million in a private funding round led by Standard Crypto, with participation also from a16z, Electric Capital and Franklin Templeton Digital Assets.

Based on the simple premise of programmable storage and greater scalability, Walrus allows developers to customize the logic by which their apps store and access data, while also leveraging an advanced data encryption algorithm (Red Stuff) that increases throughput and resiliency.

And it is thanks to its capabilities that Walrus has gained significant acceptance over the past year, signing numerous partnerships that have served to highlight its practicality and potential.

This includes deals with real-world asset blockchain Plume, developer CCP Games, esports organization Team LiquidAnd Declutterwhich now stores its news articles, videos and photos on the Walrus platform.

Such adoption has enabled Walrus to grow rapidly within its first twelve months 409 TB of total data stored in early March before surpassing 450 TB this week, which the 385 TB stored on Arweave.

Quality and quantity

For Rebecca Simmonds, director of the Walrus Foundation, this milestone is important not only because of the amount of data stored, but also because of its quality.

“The fact that we have now reached 450 TB of unencrypted data in less than a year is meaningful, especially because the data comes from real organizations,” she says. “This includes Team Liquid migrating 250 TB of esports archives, Declutter As they take over their media library, Allium will bring with them 65TB of institutional-quality blockchain data from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Sui, and other top networks.

According to Simmonds, there are several reasons why organizations choose Walrus, including its use of erasure coding (where data is broken up into fragments) which allows it to provide stronger fault tolerance at a lower replication factor.

She said: “That translates directly to lower costs at scale, and it makes us viable for organizations that store hundreds of terabytes, not just small files.”

Walrus didn’t sit still when the platform went live last year, but started adding new features and capabilities, often in response to feedback from partners and developers.

That includes the launches of Quilting in July and then Stamp in Septemberwhich respectively provided more efficient small file storage at scale and different levels of data privacy and access.

Quilt optimized small file costs so substantially that it “actually reduced” Walrus’ network revenue when it was first rolled out, Simmonds said.

“It was an interesting moment, but absolutely the right thing to do,” she added. “That responsiveness, combined with the strong underlying technology, has created the adoption flywheel.”

Simmonds notes that previous file storage platforms such as Arweave and Filecoin helped lay an important foundation for what Walrus does now, and that Walrus sees its growth as part of the growth of the World Economic Forum’s decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) sector. has estimated will grow from approximately $50 billion in 2025 to $3.5 trillion in 2028.

The “big opportunity” for verifiable data in AI

The area where Walrus believes demand for decentralized storage will increase most significantly is AI, which requires reliable data to function autonomously.

“As AI agents become more autonomous: conducting financial transactions and making decisions on our behalf, it becomes critical that we can verify what data those agents used to make those decisions, how they got there, and where the data came from,” she explains.

Because Walrus data is verifiable, tamper-proof, and always accessible, it could function as a long-term memory layer for agentic AI, allowing the latter to securely acquire the equivalent of memories and skills.

“As we’ve seen with OpenClaw and now NemoClaw for enterprise, our reliance on agents and the sensitivity of the data we pass through them is growing exponentially,” she said. “We believe this creates a great opportunity for Walrus, and it is all to play for.”

Walrus’ future road map

Walrus plans for AI to play a major role in its second year, with the Foundation actively discussing Walrus integration with AI developers and infrastructure providers, while also optimizing its platform for agent-mediated development.

Walrus is also building its own products that aim to make the data layer more seamless to use, after launching its beta this past week an SDK called MemWala “really exciting product that builders can use to equip their agents with long-term memory – with all the performance, availability and programmability that Walrus offers,” said Simmonds.

Walrus is also looking to increase its involvement in onchain finance, building on its recent partnership with blockchain data platform Allium, where “institutional-quality blockchain data is now delivered through Walrus with encrypted, programmable access,” according to Simmonds.

This could be a key growth area for Walrus, which could benefit not only from the growth of DeFi platforms, but also from the need to comply with growing regulations worldwide.

More broadly, the Walrus Foundation will continue to invest in the development and growth of its ecosystem in the coming year, including through its Request for Proposals (RFP) program.

Simmons said, “We’re already seeing meaningful projects coming out of that work, from developer tools to applications that demonstrate what you can build on Walrus.”