The tokenomics at Walrus are not pay token, the number goes up. WAL is an architecture that is meant to influence behavior in a storage network with real cost instability. The WAL token utility page explicitly outlines a penalty fee of short-term stake shifts that is partially burned and partially given out to long-term stakers since noisy stake movement can necessitate consume costly data copies across storage nodes. Walrus is attempting, in ordinary language, to deter such entrepreneurial behavior as tourist staking since storage networks require consistent commitments to remain dependable.
Walrus also makes WAL deflationary in design. Their deflation page says that payments will burn WAL, so that every single payment will have a deflationary effect as the network expands, and they also say that they plan to support USD payments in an attempt to have stronger predictability of prices. Such a mixture is not in vain: one component attempts to support the dynamics of tokens with their utilization, and the other is an attempt to make pricing appear more of a service contract than a speculative rollercoaster.
Incentive-wise, Walrus has been clear that staking rewards should be constructed in a way that is long term economically viable and not front-loaded. Their article on staking rewards states that the rewards begin small but increase with the expansion of the network, and positions it in the context of people trading short-term returns on long-term success in the network. It is a grown-up way of infrastructure, since storage operators should have sustainable business model rather than a party of emissions.
Walrus has a staking dApp and documentation to either stake to storage nodes or to unstake it. That is important as it indicates that the project anticipates normal participants - not only operators to participate in network security and incentive alignment, which is one of the ways that a decentralized storage network remains decentralized in the long run.
