feat: add dev blog (#62)

Closes: #56

---------

Co-authored-by: Markus Legner <[email protected]>

docs/SUMMARY.md

@@ -5,6 +5,11 @@
 
 ---
 
+- [The Walrus Dev Blog](./blog/00_intro.md)
+  - [Announcing Walrus](./blog/01_announcing_walrus.md)
+
+---
+
 # Design
 
 - [Objectives and use-cases](./overview/objectives_use_cases.md)

docs/blog/00_intro.md

@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+# The Walrus Dev Blog
+
+We will use this section of the Walrus documentation to publish news and updates about Walrus'
+development!

docs/blog/01_announcing_walrus.md

@@ -0,0 +1,129 @@
+# Announcing Walrus & Walrus Sites: A Decentralized Store and Web DApp Platform
+
+Walrus is an innovative decentralized storage network for blockchain apps and autonomous agents. The
+Walrus storage system is released today as a developer preview to Sui developers to gather
+feedback. We expect a general rollout to other web3 communities very soon!
+
+Leveraging innovations in erasure coding, Walrus enables fast and robust encoding of unstructured
+data blobs into smaller slivers distributed and stored over a network of storage nodes. A subset of
+slivers can be used to rapidly reconstruct the original blob reliably, even when up to two thirds of
+the slivers are missing. This is possible while keeping the replication factor down to a minimal
+4x-5x, similar to existing cloud-based services, but with the additional benefits of
+decentralization and resilience to more widespread faults.
+
+## The Replication Challenge
+
+Sui is the most advanced blockchain system in relation to storage on validators, with innovations
+such as a [storage fund](https://docs.sui.io/concepts/tokenomics/storage-fund) that future proofs
+the cost of storing on-chain data. Nevertheless, Sui still requires complete data replication among
+all validators, resulting in a replication factor of 100x or more in today's Sui mainnet. This is
+necessary for replicated computing and smart contracts acting on the state of the blockchain, but is
+inefficient when it comes to simply storing unstructured data blobs, such as music, video,
+blockchain history, etc.
+
+## Introducing Walrus: Efficient and Robust Decentralized Storage
+
+To tackle the challenge of high replication costs, Mysten Labs has developed Walrus, a decentralized
+storage network offering exceptional data availability and robustness with a minimal replication
+factor of 4x-5x. Walrus provides two key benefits:
+
+1. **Cost-Effective Blob Storage**: Walrus allows for the upload of gigabytes of data at a time with
+   minimal cost, making it an ideal solution for storing large volumes of data.\ Walrus can do this
+   because the data blob is transmitted only once over the network, and storage nodes only spend a
+   fraction of resources compared to the blob size. As a result, the more storage nodes the system
+   has, the fewer resources each storage node uses per blob.
+
+1. **High Availability and Robustness**: Data stored on Walrus enjoys enhanced reliability and
+   availability under fault conditions. Data recovery is still possible even if two-thirds of the
+   storage nodes crash or come under adversarial control. Further, availability may be certified
+   efficiently without downloading the full blob.
+
+Decentralized storage can take multiple forms in modern ecosystems. For instance, it offers better
+guarantees for digital assets traded as NFTs.  Unlike current designs that store data off-chain,
+decentralized storage ensures users own the actual resource, not just metadata, mitigating risks of
+data being taken down or misrepresented.
+
+Additionally, decentralized storage is not only useful for storing data such as pictures or files
+with high availability; it can also double as a low-cost data availability layer for rollups. Here,
+sequencers can upload transactions on Walrus, and the rollup executor only needs to temporarily
+reconstruct them for execution.
+
+We also believe Walrus will accompany existing disaster recovery strategies for millions of
+enterprise companies. Not only is Walrus low-cost, but it also provides unmatched layers of data
+availability, integrity, transparency, and resilience that centralized solutions by design cannot
+offer.
+
+Walrus is powered by the Sui Network and scales horizontally to hundreds of networked decentralized
+storage nodes. This should enable Walrus to offer Exabytes of storage at costs competitive with
+current centralized offerings, given the higher assurance and decentralization.
+
+## The Future of Walrus
+
+By releasing this developer preview we hope to share some of the design decisions with the
+decentralized app developer community, and gather feedback on the approach and the APIs for storing,
+retrieving, and certifying blobs. In this developer preview, all storage nodes are operated by
+Mysten Labs to help us understand use-cases, fix bugs, and improve the performance of the software.
+
+Future updates to Walrus will allow for dynamically changing the set of decentralized storage nodes,
+as well as changing the mapping of what slivers are managed by each storage node. The available
+operations and tools will also be expanded to cover more storage related use-cases.  Many of these
+functions will be designed with the feedback we gather in mind.
+
+Stay tuned for more updates on how Walrus will revolutionize data storage in the web3 ecosystem.
+
+## What can developers build?
+
+As part of this developer preview we provide a binary client (currently macos, ubuntu) that can be
+operated from the [command line interface](https://docs.walrus.site/usage/client-cli.html), a [JSON
+API](https://docs.walrus.site/usage/json-api.html), and an [HTTP
+API](https://docs.walrus.site/usage/web-api.html).  We also offer the community an aggregator and
+publisher service, and a Devnet deployment of 10 storage nodes operated by Mysten Labs.
+
+We hope Sui developers experiment with building applications that leverage the Walrus Decentralized
+Store in a variety of ways. As examples we hope to see the community build:
+
+- **Storage of media for NFT or dapps:** Walrus can directly store and serve media such as images,
+  sounds, sprites, videos, other game assets, etc. This is publicly available media that can be
+  accessed using HTTP requests at caches to create multimedia dapps.
+
+- **AI related use cases:** Walrus can store clean data sets of training data, datasets with a known
+  and verified provenance, models weights, and proofs of correct training for AI models. Or it may
+  be used to store and ensure the availability and authenticity of an AI model output.
+
+- **Storage of long term archival of blockchain history:** Walrus can be used as a lower cost
+  decentralized store to store blockchain history. For Sui this can include sequences of checkpoints
+  with all associated transaction and effects content. As well as historic snapshots of the
+  blockchain state, code or binaries.
+
+- **Support availability for L2s:** Walrus allows parties to certify the availability of blobs, as
+  required by L2s that need data to be stored and be attested as available to all. This may also
+  include availability of extra audit data such as validity proofs, zero knowledge proofs of correct
+  execution or large fraud proofs.
+
+- **Support a full decentralized web experience:** Walrus can host full decentralized web
+  experiences including all resources (such as js, css, html, media). These can provide content but
+  also host the UX of dapps, enabling fully decentralized front end and back ends on chain. It
+  brings the full "web" back in "web3".
+
+- **Support subscription models for media:** Creators can store encrypted media on Walrus and only
+  provide access via decryption keys to parties that have paid a subscription fee or have paid for
+  contents. (Note that Walrus provides the storage, encryption and decryption must be done off
+  Walrus).
+
+We are excited to see what else the web3 developer community can imagine!
+
+## Getting Started
+
+For this developer preview the public Walrus Devnet is openly available to all developers. Developer
+documentation is available at <https://docs.walrus.site>.
+
+SUI Testnet token is the main currency for interacting with Walrus.  Developers pay for Walrus
+Devnet storage using SUI Testnet tokens which can be acquired at the [Sui Testnet Discord
+faucet](https://discord.com/channels/916379725201563759/1037811694564560966).
+
+## One more thing
+
+The [Walrus Sites website](https://walrus.site/), the [Walrus docs](https://docs.walrus.site), and
+[this very blog](https://blog.walrus.site) are hosted on Walrus. to learn more about Walrus Sites
+and how you can deploy your own, [click
+here](https://docs.walrus.site/walrus-sites/intro.html).