Decrypt news articles, videos and photos will be stored on Sui decentralized storage solution Walrus, creating an unalterable archive of the crypto media company’s content.
The Web3 trade publication’s reporting will be stored as data files called “blobs” on Walrus, a protocol built upon layer-1 network Sui, the companies’ representatives said Tuesday at the Token 2049 conference in Singapore. The aim is to create a secure, “tamper-proof” record of Decrypt’s content to foster trust among the publication’s readership.
“Ultimately the press serves the public interest and ensuring the integrity and availability of news stories is a public good” George Danezis, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder at Mysten Labs, the blockchain infrastructure firm behind layer-1 network Sui, told Decrypt.
In the past decade, the disappearance of news content across the internet has surged due to link rot, or the breaking down of hyperlinks that makes web addresses that point to digital content such as news articles or videos no longer accessible to internet users.
This “digital decay” occurs when a web page is deleted from its host server, or when the host server itself no longer exists, according to non-profit research firm Pew Research.
More than a third of online content vanished from the internet between 2013 and 2023, a Pew Research report shows. Meanwhile, 23% of news articles featured at least one dead link, the same data shows.
But storing articles on decentralized storage protocols could help content publishers sidestep that problem.
“Decentralized storage infrastructures require coordination between vast numbers of storage nodes, in relation to who is participating in the system,” Danezis said. “Walrus leverages Sui for all these functions.”
Link rot occurs when a web page is deleted from its host server, or when the host server itself no longer exists.
But by leveraging decentralized protocols such as Walrus, that isn't an issue — the network and the data it stores aren't centralized, meaning they can't be deleted by any one person.
Walrus also plans to support Decrypt’s efforts to monetize its content through Web3 integrations, promoting interoperability between Decrypt’s website and decentralized apps, NFTs and other blockchain-based assets.
More broadly, the protocol also aims to leverage distributed-ledger technology to roll out competitively priced storage solutions for media companies, offering cheaper alternatives to centralized cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.