LECCA Intern 🍜

Walrus: a faster, cheaper, verifiable data layer for the AI and agentic commerce era When centralized clouds shut down, the entire internet halts as well. @WalrusProtocol was designed so data is always live by splitting content across many nodes, anchors “proofs of availability” on-chain, and serves assets through multiple routes. So even when parts of the network fail, apps can still continue running and provenance stays auditable. - - - - - Intro @WalrusProtocol is a decentralized data platform created by @Mysten_Labs, the team behind @SuiNetwork. Data (“blobs”) are erasure-coded and spread across a global set of $WAL-staked storage nodes; metadata, economics, and proof settlement live on Sui. Each blob is mapped to a Sui object (type of value on Sui, addressable on-chain by unique IDs), so ownership and access control become fully programmable → this is where data can interact with smart contracts, payments, and permissions. Tech stack • Red Stuff encoding & sharding: Reduces data replication overhead costs by slicing data into fragments stored across many nodes, rebuilding from subsets if some fail (improves efficiency) • Proofs of Availability (PoA): Nodes are randomly challenged to prove they still hold their data with each signed proof recorded on Sui→ this creates a public, immutable audit ledger of what data is actually available on-chain • Programmability: Transforms data into a programmable asset – enabling automation, monetisation, and access control through Sui smart contracts • Access layer: Portals and “Walrus Sites” provide many paths to publish and get relevant content (no single point of failure) • Cost advantage: About ~80% cost savings are attributed to Walrus’s “Red Stuff” erasure coding and architecture when compared to legacy solutions like Filecoin and Arweave Network stats • Total blobs stored: ~15.45m all-time has been registered, that is actual scale • Utilization: ~538 TB used of ~4,167 TB capacity (~12.9%) • Daily flow: ~5.5k new blobs; 10k–15k storage events • Security: ~1.01B $WAL staked (roughly ~67% of current circulating supply in the market) across ~125 storage nodes Competitive landscape: How Walrus stacks up against Filecoin, Arweave, and IPFS • @WalrusProtocol: Provides verifiable, programmable data management with flexible storage terms; metadata resides on Sui; erasure-coded shards on WAL-staked nodes. Red Stuff encoding delivers lower effective $/GB by avoiding multiple full copies while retaining fast recovery and auditability. • @Filecoin: Offers a market for storage deals (default “cold” archival); miners prove replication and spacetime for term-based contracts. Pay for durable copies (or “forever” persistence), trading off write cost and policy flexibility. Posts zk/PoSt proofs periodically • @ArweaveEco: “Blockweave” for permanent archival; pay once, store forever; proof-of-access built atop PoW. Both Filecoin and Arweave typically pay for durable copies (“forever” persistence), trading off write cost and policy flexibility. Arweave anchors permanence via the blockweave history • @IPFS: content-addressed P2P network; discovery and transport only → persistence requires pinning or external providers. IPFS verifies content hashes on fetch but not persistence In a nutshell, Walrus’ key USP lies in the fact that for apps that need verifiable availability, hot retrieval, and programmable data flows (AI agents, ad performance, dynamic apps), their architecture optimises the cost/performance pain points that general-purpose archival systems or transport layers generally do not optimize for. Adoption and traction for Walrus • @Everlyn_ai (AI video): Using Walrus as the default data layer for video and training artifacts → migrating datasets off AWS/Azure, storing 5k-plus user videos, and leveraging Sui for smart payments (maintain speed while lowering storage costs) • @TalusNetwork (on-chain AI agents): Uses Walrus as its default data layer, so agent state and models have verifiable availability • @flock_io (privacy-preserving AI): Uses Walrus with Seal to enable storing, training, and deploying AI models with privacy guarantees • @Humanityprot (human ID): Uses Walrus to store over ~10m verified user credentials on-chain leveraging Walrus’s verifiable, high-throughput data layer for identity proofs. This integration enables real-time credential issuance, programmable access control, and cross-chain identity verification Recall October’s AWS outage which took many websites offline (since traditional sites cluster in one cloud region). Websites and apps using Walrus are served from multiple decentralized storage nodes with onchain metadata and portal access → thus removing the single-region dependency and keeping content retrievable even when some nodes or regions go dark. This is exactly the class of failure Walrus was designed to avoid. Our personal takeaways • Walrus promises ~80% lower effective storage cost vs. incumbents and more partnerships will only prove that the tech works • There are already live partners across AI/video, agents, adtech, data marketplaces, identity → which is good since there is an actual infra to migrate content off centralized clouds • Walrus’ edge is that it has the capacity to provide verifiable availability at fast speed with programmable economics • Some considerations involve a dependency on Sui as Walrus offloads metadata, pricing, staking, and proof settlement to Sui → which means they inherit Sui’s liveness/fee conditions and governance and any Sui outage or congestion can affect performance. Slashing is also not live yet, so any misbehavior relies more on reputation/economics than hard penalties - - - - - Walrus partner, views are my own

Quick rundown on x402 -->@coinbase 's Internet-Native Payment Standard TLDR: Enabling Al agents to make instant payments using stablecoins Intro • An open-source payment protocol developed by Coinbase --> enabling instant, autonomous micropayments directly over HTTP • Governed by the x402 Foundation (co-founded by Coinbase and @Cloudflare) and operates on @base with $USDC, enabling payments as low as $0.001 with ~2-second settlement times • x402 embeds payments directly into HTTP interactions using the long-dormant 402 status code • Leverages existing EVM standards rather than deploying custom contracts, utilizing USDC's EIP-3009 compliance for transfers Use Cases & Ecosystem Applications • AI Agent Autonomous Payments: x402's flagship use case enables AI agents to act as independent economic entities, automatically paying for API access, data retrieval, and compute resources • Integration with Model Context Protocol (MCP): allows agents to discover and purchase tools without human intervention, supporting the emerging "agentic economy" projected to reach $30 trillion by 2030 Real world implementations •@circle integration: AI agents create email-based wallets, onramp fiat, and execute autonomous USDC payments • @Cloudflare Agents SDK: Pay-per-crawl functionality • @Google A2A/AP2: Integration with Agent2Agent and Agent Payments Protocol creates hybrid agent-human payment capabilities Some x402 tokens • $VIRTUAL • $PING • $SANTA • $PAYAI • $DREAMS • $AURA • $HEU • $MRDN (NFA just listing out the tokens that are in this narrative) Personal thoughts This represents a shift toward internet-native payments, positioning itself as the "HTTPS for value" in the AI-driven economy

Many people wrote off @hyperlendx team initially "They are too young", "they don't have much experience building", "Hyperliquid eco is not developed yet" Screw that, numbers speak for itself and the way the team works behind the scenes is a testament to that. Been helping @0xNessus, @fbsloXBT and am sure the wider team will continue to thrive. Remember, the wolf on the hill is not as hungry as the wolf climbing the hill