Using Walrus to Preserve Blockchain History

Blockchains are widely trusted for keeping accurate records. Everyone agrees on what the current state is, however, being able to look back at old data depends on how well that historical data is saved and maintained. 

On Sui, checkpoints define what happened on the network and when. They are the authoritative record of transaction ordering, execution, and finality. They’re also foundational for anyone who needs to prove what the network did at a specific moment in time, such as auditors verifying historical correctness or researchers analyzing market behavior

As networks grow, nodes optimize for performance, infrastructure providers evolve their systems, and historical records are often distributed across RPCs, indexers, and internal databases. For many applications, that’s perfectly adequate. But for systems where history underpins trust - markets, governance, audits, and risk analysis - reliable access to historical data becomes a foundational requirement rather than a nice-to-have. 

This creates a gap between “this executed” and “this can still be independently proven later.” Closing that gap is especially important for financial systems, governance processes, and applications that rely on historical context to establish trust.

Today, we’re closing that gap.

Introducing the Sui Archival System

The Sui archival system addresses this challenge by treating blockchain history as shared infrastructure, rather than as a byproduct of individual nodes or providers. It stores the network’s checkpoint history on Walrus and publishes it via a public Walrus Sites application. This system is more than an archive - it demonstrates a reusable design pattern for any protocol that needs its historical data to remain accessible, verifiable, and resilient over time.

Here’s how it works:

• Sui checkpoint data is continuously published to Walrus
• Data is stored with default redundancy and cryptographic integrity that comes by design
• A shared storage fund supports the long-term availability of the archive
• Anyone can independently fetch and verify historical checkpoints
• No single RPC provider, database, or organization is required to keep the history accessible

This approach ensures that Sui’s checkpoint history remains publicly available, independently verifiable, and resilient to provider changes or failures, even as the network and its ecosystem evolve. 

This application is already operating at real-world scale. The initial archival process published roughly 30TB of Sui checkpoint data to Walrus over the course of a couple of weeks, using standard client-side tooling. Storage costs for this initial archive amounted to approximately 15-18K WAL for the full dataset, with each archival blob backed by Walrus’s default redundancy and stored across multiple epochs. Importantly, the system itself did not experience any throughput bottleneck. The upload speed was bounded by the client environment, reinforcing that this approach scales with the capabilities of publishers.

Your Blueprint for Verifiable History 

Although this system was built for Sui, the underlying pattern is broadly applicable. Any chain, protocol, or Defi system that depends on historical data faces similar challenges. 

Common examples include:

• order book and trade history used in dispute resolution
• oracle inputs and pricing snapshots referenced during liquidations
• governance records and proposal artifacts consulted long after votes conclude
• risk models and parameter changes reviewed during audits or incidents

In these cases, state alone is not sufficient. The surrounding data – assumptions, inputs, and historical context – is what allows systems to be understood, audited, and trusted over time.

Walrus provides a way to store this data once, make it verifiable by default, and keep it available without relying on a single operator or centralized service. For protocols that require selective access or private phases, the same pattern can be extended with Seal, allowing data to remain encrypted while still being provable and selectively shareable with auditors, partners, or regulators.

Chain Agnostic by Design

From an engineering perspective, the checkpoint archive is not limited to use on Sui. It is built using the same primitives available to any builder:

• Walrus storage for durable, redundant data persistence
• Cryptographic verification baked into reads and writes
• Shared funding mechanisms to support long-lived public data
• Simple HTTP access via aggregators for broad compatibility
• Walrus Sites to publish and serve data without custom backend infrastructure

Builders can use it to preserve data on any chain, making it an adaptable solution for any historical data needs. The full system is available on GitHub for builders to try and adapt.

History as Infrastructure

For high-stakes systems - financial markets, governance frameworks, and increasingly autonomous applications - historical data is not just something to look up. It is something relied upon to explain decisions, resolve disputes, and establish credibility with users and counterparties.

By archiving Sui checkpoints on Walrus, this system demonstrates a practical way to extend blockchain finality beyond execution and into long-term proof. It shows how networks can preserve their historical record in a way that remains neutral, verifiable, and resilient over time. And by publishing this openly, it invites other chains and protocol builders to adopt the same approach - not as an ideal, but as a pragmatic piece of infrastructure.

Explore the Sui archival system → 

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