Walrus, the decentralized data storage platform developed by Mysten Labs, is marking its one-year anniversary on March 27 after a debut year that included major funding, rapid data growth, and a string of notable partnerships. The platform launched shortly after the Walrus Foundation secured $140 million in a private funding round led by Standard Crypto, with participation from a16z, Electric Capital, and Franklin Templeton Digital Assets. Built on the principle of programmable storage and greater scalability, Walrus allows developers to customize how their applications store and retrieve data.
A core technical feature underpinning the platform is an advanced data encoding algorithm called Red Stuff, which increases throughput and resilience. Walrus also employs erasure coding, a method that breaks data into fragments to deliver stronger fault tolerance at a lower replication factor. According to the Foundation’s Managing Executive, Rebecca Simmonds, this approach translates into lower costs at scale, making the platform viable for organizations handling hundreds of terabytes of data.
Over the past twelve months, Walrus has attracted a range of partners that illustrate its practical applications. These include real-world asset blockchain Plume, game developer CCP Games, esports organization Team Liquid, and media outlet Decrypt, which now stores its articles, videos, and photos on the platform. Team Liquid alone migrated 250 TB of esports archives, while blockchain data platform Allium brought 65 TB of institutional-grade data from networks including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Sui.
This adoption has driven significant data growth, with Walrus reaching 409 TB in early March before surpassing 450 TB later in the month, exceeding the 385 TB stored on competing platform Arweave. Simmonds emphasized that the significance of this milestone lies not just in volume but in the caliber of organizations contributing that data. She noted that the platform’s growth reflects real-world utility rather than speculative use.
Walrus continued to expand its feature set throughout its first year, launching Quilt in July to optimize storage of small files at scale, and Seal in September to enable varying levels of data privacy and access control. Simmonds acknowledged that Quilt’s efficiency gains initially reduced network revenue when it was first introduced, but described the decision to release it as the right move. She credited that responsiveness, combined with strong underlying technology, as the driver of the platform’s adoption momentum.
Looking ahead, Walrus sees artificial intelligence as a major growth frontier. As AI agents become more autonomous—executing financial transactions and making decisions on behalf of users—the ability to verify the data those agents rely on becomes increasingly important. Because data stored on Walrus is verifiable, tamper-proof, and consistently accessible, Simmonds described it as a potential long-term memory layer for agentic AI systems. The Foundation is actively in discussions with AI developers and infrastructure providers about integration opportunities.
To support this direction, Walrus this week beta-launched an SDK called MemWal, designed to equip AI agents with long-term memory capabilities using the platform’s performance and programmability features. The Foundation is also expanding its presence in onchain finance, building on its partnership with Allium to deliver institutional-grade blockchain data through encrypted, programmable access. Simmonds pointed to the growth of DeFi platforms and increasing global regulatory requirements as additional drivers of demand in this area.
Walrus situates its own expansion within the broader growth of the decentralized physical infrastructure sector, known as DePIN, which the World Economic Forum has estimated will grow from approximately $50 billion in 2025 to $3.5 trillion by 2028. The Foundation plans to continue investing in its ecosystem through initiatives such as its Request for Proposals program, which Simmonds said is already producing meaningful developer tools and applications. Earlier platforms such as Arweave and Filecoin are credited by Simmonds with laying the groundwork that Walrus is now building upon.
Originally reported by Decrypt.
