Introducing WAL
The native token for Walrus
WAL’s utility
WAL’s utility
Walrus economics and incentive mechanisms, anchored by the WAL token, are designed to ensure competitive pricing, the efficient allocation of resources, and minimal adversarial behavior by nodes. This design enables Walrus’ long-term success for storing data in a fully permissionless and decentralized fashion.
WAL is the payment token for storage on the Walrus protocol, with the payment mechanism designed to keep storage costs stable in fiat terms and protect against long-term fluctuations in the WAL token price. When users pay for storage, they pay to have data stored for a fixed amount of time and the WAL paid upfront is distributed across time to storage nodes and stakers as compensation for their services. This mechanism ensures both that the Walrus protocol is financially sustainable and that users can expect their data to be held safely and securely.
The WAL token distribution includes a 10% allocation for subsidies, intended to support the protocol’s adoption in its early phases. In particular, these subsidies will allow users to access storage at a lower rate than the current market price of storage, while also ensuring that storage nodes have viable business models.
Delegated Staking of WAL tokens underpins Walrus’ security. Users can stake tokens to participate in the network’s security regardless of whether they operate storage services directly. Nodes compete with one another to attract stake from users, which in turn governs the assignment of data to them. Nodes, and those that delegate their stake to them, earn rewards based on their behavior. In the future, once slashing is enabled on Walrus, these mechanisms will ensure the full alignment between WAL token holders, Walrus users, and Walrus operators.
Governance for Walrus adjusts the parameters in the system, and operates through the WAL token. Nodes collectively determine the level of various penalties, with votes equivalent to their respective WAL stakes. Walrus nodes, who often bear the costs of other nodes’ underperformance, calibrate the appropriate financial repercussions.
WAL
Burning
The Walrus protocol is deflationary and will additionally introduce two burning mechanisms:
Short-term stake shifts will be subject to a penalty fee, which will be partially burnt and partially distributed to long-term stakers. In Walrus, noisy short-term shifts in stake produce a negative externality on the network since they require data to be shifted around storage nodes, incurring expensive migration costs. By introducing these penalty fees, Walrus incentivizes long-term staking decisions.
Staking with low performant storage nodes will be subject to slashing and a partial amount of these fees are burnt. Slashing will ensure that long-term stakers are incentivized to actively stake with performant nodes. Burning thus supports Walrus’ overall performance, while also preventing malicious entities from gaming the system.
Once implemented, WAL burning will create deflationary pressure on the WAL token in service of the Walrus protocol, reinforcing the network’s performance and security model.
Token distribution
Walrus is a community-driven protocol, and as such, WAL distribution was designed to align the whole ecosystem—core contributors, early adopters, builders, and users—in the continued growth and success of the network.
Over 60% of all WAL tokens are allocated to the Walrus community through airdrops, subsidies, and the Community Reserve.
5,000,000,000
WAL
1,250,000,000
WAL
WAL tokens will be distributed in the following manner:
43%
Community reserve
10%
Walrus user drop
10%
Subsidies
30%
Core contributors
7%
Investors
Community reserve
690M WAL available at launch with linear unlock until March 2033
This portion is committed to the long-term development and growth of the Walrus ecosystem, including community grants and programs, developer support, Walrus core research, incentive programs, Walrus community events, hackathons, and other ecosystem initiatives, administered by the Walrus Foundation.
Walrus user drop
4% Pre-Mainnet
6% Post-Mainnet
Fully unlocked
This portion is reserved for allocations directly to community members from the Sui and Walrus ecosystems that have taken or will take an active role in the success of Walrus and engage with it in a meaningful way. Includes initial Walrus airdrop and future direct distributions of tokens.
Subsidies
Unlocks linearly over 50 months
This portion is used to subsidize payments offered to storage nodes as the fee base grows.
Core contributors
20% Early contributors: 4 year unlock with 1 year cliff
10% Mysten Labs: 50M WAL available at launch with linear unlock until March 2030
This portion is allocated to those who supported the early work on engineering, infrastructure, security, growth, and operations of Walrus. It unlocks over time to ensure core contributors stay aligned with Walrus’ long-term goals.
Investors
Unlocks 12 months from Mainnet launch
This portion is reserved for investors in Walrus.
WAL token release schedule
