By the start of 2026, Walrus no longer felt like something I was simply watching from the sidelines. It had become something I understood through use, not just observation. Late 2025 was not kind to sentiment. Prices drifted, attention moved elsewhere, and many dismissed it as another small project tied too closely to a single ecosystem. But beneath that surface, something steady was taking shape.
What stood out first was usage. Storage demand kept increasing even when market interest faded. Large datasets were being committed, not speculated on. That was a signal worth paying attention to. Over time, Walrus began to look less like a Sui-specific experiment and more like a neutral layer that could live across chains.
Now that shift is visible. With cross-chain integrations expanding beyond Sui, developers are no longer confined to a single environment. Ethereum and Solana connections opened practical paths for teams working with large datasets, whether those are AI training sets, game environments, or media-heavy applications. The benefit is not novelty, but flexibility. Builders can choose the execution layer they prefer while relying on the same storage backbone.
Using the protocol personally changed how I viewed it. Uploading AI experiment data through the SDK made the economics tangible. Costs were predictable and modest, and the cryptographic guarantees removed a quiet concern I had grown used to tolerating with centralized providers. Data integrity stopped being something I hoped for and became something the system enforced.
As more teams began exploring decentralized machine learning workflows, storage demand followed naturally. Not suddenly, not explosively, but consistently. That consistency mattered more than short-term price movement. Tokens moved, as they always do, but the underlying activity told a calmer and more convincing story.
My approach evolved alongside that understanding. I did not treat WAL as something to simply hold or trade. Part of it stayed staked, contributing to network security and earning modest yield. Some was used directly for storage credits. A portion was sold when attention briefly returned. None of it was rushed. The strategy reflected the nature of the protocol itself: measured, utility-driven, and patient.
The introduction of encrypted storage capabilities added another layer of relevance. Privacy-sensitive use cases, from early NFT platforms to data feeds used in DeFi, began testing what could be built when storage itself did not leak context. These experiments are still small, but they point in a clear direction.
I do not see Walrus as a dramatic bet. It feels more like an alignment with how Web3 is slowly maturing. As AI workloads grow and applications span multiple chains, data becomes the shared constraint. Infrastructure that handles it reliably tends to gain importance quietly, long before it gains attention.
What changed my perspective was not price appreciation alone, but participation. Research, testing, and adapting did more than watching charts ever could. If you care about where Web3 infrastructure is actually heading, Walrus remains worth observing. Not because it promises anything extraordinary, but because it continues to do ordinary things well, at a time when that is becoming increasingly valuable.
