Recently, I’ve been monitoring Walrus’s on-chain data and discovered an interesting paradox. The total storage capacity is 4167TB, but the actual utilization rate is only 26%. In other words, over 3000TB of space is just sitting idle. At first glance, it seems like a waste of resources, but upon closer reflection, it becomes clear—this is not waste, it’s a matter of survival.

Comparing this to traditional cloud storage highlights the difference. Centralized platforms like AWS and Alibaba Cloud prefer to fill every hard drive because idle hardware equals cost. But decentralized storage networks operate under a completely different logic. Nodes are distributed worldwide, and at any moment, some may go offline or exit. If capacity is used beyond 90%, a few critical nodes failing simultaneously could cause the entire network to face a storage crisis—new users wanting to upload data would have nowhere to store it.

Walrus maintains this 26% utilization rate essentially as an emergency buffer for the network. It always keeps enough redundant space to handle unexpected situations. More importantly, Walrus uses Reed-Solomon erasure coding, which requires 4.5 times the storage redundancy to ensure data security. If the underlying capacity isn’t sufficient, data security cannot be guaranteed. What appears to be waste is actually a necessary cost.

However, this number also reflects a real issue: Walrus’s actual usage demand is far below expectations. The 4167TB capacity should be enough to support a fairly large ecosystem, yet only a quarter of it is utilized. This indicates either insufficient promotion, immature application scenarios, or the need for price optimization.