What is Arweave? Arweave is a protocol that allows you to permanently, persistently store data for a single upfront fee. Let’s find out what is special about this project with Weakhand in this article.
What is Arweave?
The web as we understand it today is largely a data storage and retrieval system. Data is stored on a server, which then provides this information back to the requesting user.
Centrally stored data can easily be lost, manipulated, or censored, and websites and apps can disappear when there is no longer funding to maintain them. Arweave was developed to solve the problem of data on the internet by providing a flexible, decentralized information preservation protocol.
Arweave is a decentralized storage platform that allows users to store data on a decentralized computer network, instead of on a single centralized server. Arweave uses a new data storage model called “blockweave”, which allows it to store data permanently, even when the computers storing the data are offline.
So what is blockwearve?
A Blockweave is a set of blocks that each contain data and are linked to two previous blocks: The previous block in the chain (similar to traditional blockchains like Bitcoin) and a random block from the previous history of the chain block. This random block is called the “recall block”. This ensures that nodes store up to the old blocks and not just the previous block.
The revocation block is key to the functionality of Arweave’s unique consensus mechanism called Proof of Access.
Here’s how it works: Blockweave is maintained by miners who provide disk space and copy data stored in the network in return for AR tokens. To mine or verify a new block, these miners must provide cryptographic proof that they can access Blockweave’s reclaimed block.
Arweave is currently at version Arweave 2.0. Arweave 2.0 significantly increases the actual block size of the network today and paves the way for on-chain data storage of nearly unlimited size in the future. Additionally, Arweave 2.0 also introduces an improved fast write mechanism, eliminating limitations on how fast data can be written to the Arweave network.
Date storage technology is improving. As a result, data storage costs have decreased at a rate of about 30% annually.
Arweave calculates the cost of data storage over the next 200 years with the assumption that data storage costs will only decrease at a rate of 0.5% per year. Users must pay this upfront cost. This money is collected in an endowment fund and paid to miners for data storage.
Arweave Operating Model
The main components participating in the Arweave network include:
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Miner (miner): Individuals or organizations contribute computing power to the Arweave network to validate transactions and store data. They are rewarded with AR tokens (Arweave’s main token) for their contributions to the network.
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User: Individuals or organizations use the Arweave network to store and retrieve data. Users can be individuals or organizations that want to permanently store data, such as documents, images, or other types of media.
Here is an overview of the operating model on the Arweave network:
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Users pay a small fee in AR to store their data on the Arweave network. This fee is used to pay network participants (called miners) to contribute their computing resources to store and validate data.
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When users want to store data on the Arweave network, they first create a transaction that includes data and fees. The transaction is broadcast to the network and added to the pool of pending transactions.
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Miners select transactions from the pool and put them into a new block, which they then attempt to add to that block. To do this, they must solve a cryptographic puzzle, a process known as “mining”.
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When a miner successfully adds a block to the blockchain, they are rewarded with a portion of the fees included in the transactions in the block. This incentivizes them to contribute computing resources to the network and helps ensure the security and integrity of data stored on Arweave.
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Once a block is added to blockweave, it becomes a permanent part of the network and the data contained within can never be altered or deleted. This makes Arweave an ideal platform for storing important documents, records, and other types of data that need to be preserved for long periods of time.
What is the Arweave Difference?
Miners must have access to the reclaimed block in order to mine new blocks and receive rewards. Since the choice of reclaimed block is unpredictable, miners are incentivized to store larger amounts of data, thus increasing the likelihood that they will have access to the correct reclaimed block, allowing them to mine new blocks and Get mining rewards. This incentive mechanism also incentivizes miners to store rarer blocks instead of well-stored ones, as they compete with a smaller number of miners for the same level of rewards.
Arweave also uses a data sharing system called “wildfire”. Accordingly, miners in Arweave are ranked based on the speed with which they respond to requests and accept data from other miners in the network. This is called the miners’ credit score. Miners with higher credit scores are more likely to receive AR token rewards. Miners who do not promptly share information may be permanently blacklisted from the Arweave network. The design aims to encourage good behavior among miners in the network.
Blockweave enables scalable on-chain storage in a cost-effective way. As the amount of data stored in the system increases, the amount of hashing required for consensus decreases, thereby reducing the cost of data storage.
Today, content creation on the Internet is very common, but evidence of its origin, ownership and impact is still centralized by regulators. With Arweave, every piece of content can be recorded over time and stored in the blockchain to provide a clear (and defensible) claim of ownership.
There can be cases where malicious users use Arweave to upload illegal content such as child pornography, etc. Arweave solves the problem by:
- Arweave provides tools to miners that allow them to decide what assets they want to store.
- In the case of 51% of miners refusing to store content, the Arweave network does not store that content. Therefore, only data that is unacceptable in most countries and cultures will be rejected by the network.
Core Team
Arweave was founded by Sam Williams and William Jones in 2017 as Archain. The company then changed its name to Arweave in 2018.
Sam William: CEO & Co-Founder
- Sam graduated in computer science from the University of Nottingham.
- He came up with the idea during the 2016 presidential election to overcome fake news.
- Sam presented the idea to William Jones, a PhD colleague. student at the University of Kent.
- They then dropped out of college in 2017 to develop the Arweave project.
William Jone: CTO & Co-Founder
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William Jone holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Kent.
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He met Sam William at the University of Kent while doing his Ph.D. in computer science.
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William Jone dropped out and co-founded Arweave with Sam William in 2017.
Investor
Arweave has raised a total of $22M from Seed Rounds detailed as follows:
- June 6, 2018: Arweave announced successfully raising $8.7M from funds such as One Block Capital, 1kx, ….
- November 6, 2019: Arweave announced it successfully raised $5M led by A16z.
- March 5, 2020: Arweave announced it successfully raised $8.3M led by A16z.
In May 2021, Coinbase Ventures announced an investment in Arweave but did not disclose a specific amount.
Tokenomics
Basic information about tokens
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Token Name: Arweave
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Ticker: AR
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Blockchain: Arweave
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Token Type: Utility
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Total Supply: 66,000,000 AR
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Viewblock:
Token Allocation
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Seed sale: 9%
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Private Sale: 13.4%
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Public Sale: 3.7%
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Strategic Partners: 5.4%
- Advisor: 2.4%
- Team: 10.8%
- Ecosystem: 55.2%
Token Release
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55 million AR tokens were created in the genesis block at the network launch on June 8, 2018.
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11 million AR will be put into circulation gradually as block mining rewards.
Token Use Case
AR is a token used to:
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Pay the fee to upload data to the network.
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Reward miners who join the network.
Exchanges
AR tokens are traded on CEX such as Binance, Kucoin, OKX…
Information Channel of Arweave Project
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Website: https://www.arweave.org/
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/arweaveteam
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Medium:
summary
Arweave strives to dramatically change data storage industry standards and create a new internet where information is permanently accessible. Blockweave architecture is a unique development of the project. Miner content moderation policies and a competition-based approach distinguish Arweave from the countless decentralized blockchain data storage projects out there.