Itheum Enables Large-Scale Data Tokenization for Musicians and AI on Walrus

Itheum is a protocol that gives people and AI agents true ownership of their data. The platform aims to become the decentralized storage, tokenization, IP transparency, and monetization layer for all data in the AI era, with an initial focus in providing their tech to the music industry. Real-world data can be tokenized on Itheum to create liquid digital assets, which can be used to trade and control large files, like master audio tracks, music WAV stem files, HD videos, and custom AI models. Itheum will become the infrastructure to enable autonomous digital data economies.

Itheum’s initial focus is on disrupting the music and agentic AI industries by providing the technology for musicians and AI agents to secure copyright protection for, monetize, and distribute their work. Building on Walrus' decentralized programmable protocol enabled Itheum to overcome critical infrastructure challenges, offering a robust and scalable solution for storing the large, high-value files that these industries require. ‍

Challenge

Itheum’s initial storage infrastructure, a custom abstraction layer using IPFS, Arweave, and Filecoin, alongside proprietary orchestration technology, successfully handled smaller files. However, it struggled to meet the demands of the high-value data their initial target audiences require, like large original high-resolution master files (WAVs), STEM files, HD music videos, and long-form podcast content.

Storing and retrieving these large files was slow, prohibitively expensive, and suffered from unreliable latency. Inconsistent gateway reliability also meant that data could temporarily go offline without notice, creating a poor user experience.‍

Solution

The Itheum team identified Walrus as the ideal solution to provide reliable, cost-efficient storage for large files. By building on Walrus, Itheum can now ensure that large datasets are stored durably, managed easily, and can be retrieved with high performance and low latency. 

The reliability of Walrus’ decentralized storage provides the solid foundation Itheum needs to serve as a core infrastructure layer for the AI and music data economies, making it practical and affordable for users to tokenize, trade, and distribute large, high-quality data assets.

“We chose Walrus because of its unparalleled ability to handle large file storage with efficiency and resilience. Walrus allows us to address one of our community’s biggest pain points – reliable access to high-quality media and data files without exorbitant costs or latency issues." — Mark Paul, Founder and CEO of Itheum

Why Walrus?

In addition to solving its large file storage challenges, Itheum was drawn to Walrus’ deep integration and compatibility with Sui. Building on Sui and Walrus as a unified technology stack  allows Itheum to develop its infrastructure more seamlessly while minimizing potential Web3 technology disconnects. 

Itheum also makes its data tokens more powerful by linking data from Walrus with smart contracts on Sui. For AI agents, for example, Walrus unlocks the storage of large models, training data, and refinement—which can then be traded autonomously with other agents on Sui.

With Walrus, Itheum is poised to unlock the full potential of its data tokenization technology. The ability to handle large assets reliably and affordably removes a major barrier to adoption and opens up a new world of possibilities for data ownership and monetization in the AI creator economy.