The Silent Growth of the Everlasting Network: An Overview of the Information Permanent Storage Protocol Arweave Ecosystem

This article was published on ChainNews, authored by LeftOfCenter.

A discussion on Zhihu titled "Is there a permanent place to store data?" has garnered over 980,000 views. While the hot comments are filled with astonishing ideas, we can see the helplessness and avoidance regarding the challenge of long-term information storage.

After all, the internet storage products most people are familiar with are not reliable. Once the operating team behind a product loses control, data can be lost. Similarly, purchasing hard drives to store data also carries the risk of hard drive failure and unreadability.

However, in fact, two years before this question was raised—specifically in 2017—the Arweave team, dedicated to creating a "permanent information storage" solution, was established. From the very beginning, they proposed an ambitious vision: to permanently preserve human knowledge and history. However, for a long time, Arweave has not truly entered the public eye due to its immature product.

In the past three years, we have seen Arweave gradually moving towards its goal. As the network effects of the developer ecosystem become apparent, more and more web applications are emerging on the Arweave protocol, whether refined or rough, a gradually complete ecological puzzle is beginning to take shape.

As of now, applications based on the Arweave network have surpassed 200 in number, covering various categories such as social networks, infrastructure, content distribution, and verification tools.

With the Arweave development team set to release version 2.4.0.0 today, introducing a new consensus mechanism SPoRA, the protocol may achieve a 100-1000 fold increase in the number of data copies stored on the network, while also shifting more computation on the network to storage. This will be an important developmental milestone.

It's time to summarize the development status of the Arweave ecosystem.

What is Arweave?

Arweave was founded in 2017 and graduated from the Berlin Techstars startup accelerator program in April 2018. As a blockchain-based file storage protocol, Arweave features a one-time payment for permanent file storage, allowing miners to store data long-term through a simple set of economic incentive rules. Internet users can use the Arweave browser plugin to achieve permanent storage of web pages, emails, social media posts, and other digital files and data on the blockchain.

Currently, the data loss rate on the internet is very high. Data shows that over 95% of information on the internet will be lost every 20 years. This is the problem that the blockchain data storage protocol Arweave aims to solve, providing a permanent data storage solution for the internet and incentivizing developers to build a permanent application ecosystem based on an encrypted incentive mechanism.

Permanent storage is the core function of AR. On the Arweave protocol, permanently storing 1 GB of data costs 2.45 AR, approximately $19 (due to AR price fluctuations, storage costs may also vary).

Arweave can guarantee data permanence, price stability, and affordability. Relying on blockchain technology, the data stored in AR is also verifiable and traceable, making it very suitable as a "Turing machine tape" for trusted computing.

The Arweave protocol has launched Smartweave smart contracts, a scripting language based on JavaScript, stored on the Arweave network.

Unlike smart contracts on Ethereum (and other public chains), Smartweave is not executed by miner nodes but is executed locally by the caller. Since the caller node executes (and verifies) all transactions in the contract's history, they do not need to trust or rely on any nodes to obtain a trustworthy computation result (i.e., the new state of the smart contract). Therefore, each Smartweave contract can be viewed as a layer two chain of Arweave, and executing a smart contract is a full synchronization and verification of the layer two chain.

This design effectively resolves the scalability/computational cost issues of the DApp business logic layer of the Arweave protocol. Smart contracts can include any complex computation almost without limits, incurring very low marginal costs, as the caller's computing device is usually already purchased or long-term rented.

Additionally, callers can name the result state of the contract, forming a snapshot of the contract state. If the caller is trustworthy (for example, if the caller is the smart contract developer), subsequent callers can specify the state snapshot as the initial state and only need to execute transactions after the snapshot, thus solving the state explosion problem.

Regarding the technical principles and development prospects of Arweave, Liu Yi, founder of Cdot Network and partner at Random Capital, has written for ChainNews, "The potential of Arweave is to revive the Library of Alexandria, not to be a Filecoin substitute," specifically introducing it.

Recently, Arweave is undergoing a significant technical upgrade. Its development team has released version 2.4.0.0, which will activate a hard fork at block height 633720 on 2021-02-24 11:50 UTC, introducing a new consensus mechanism SPoRA, which can fundamentally increase the number of data copies stored on the network by 100-1000 times, while also shifting more computation on the network to storage.

Additionally, Verto Exchange co-founder and CTO John Letey recently released a SmartWeave patch that supports embedding smart contracts in any asset created on Arweave. By simply adding two tags, data formats such as web pages, images, videos, and audio can be converted into profit-sharing tokens or NFTs. These can then be traded on The Verto Protocol, just like any other asset.

Profit Sharing Tokens PST and Their Community PSC

It is worth noting that Arweave has adopted a Profit Sharing Token (PST) mechanism, which fundamentally improves the way developers create network services.

In this mechanism, permanent applications developed based on the Arweave protocol can issue a "Profit Sharing Token PST." Whenever a user interacts with the application and generates transactions on the Arweave network, a tip charged in the native Arweave token AR will be sent to specific PST token holders, with the distribution amount based on the holding ratio of that PST token.

The PST model is significant for both web application developers and users.

First, as long as the developed web application has sufficient utility, developers can earn compensation for their work without performing any other operations, and it supports immediate monetization in the secondary market.

Second, fundamentally different from the ICO model, this profit-sharing token mechanism is a more practical investment model. In previous ICO models, a project's development team typically crowdfunded based on future ideas, where investors often had to trust that the team had the capability to build and launch a product, and then invest in tokens of certain value within that system through ICO. The flaws of this model are evident, leading to a large number of unviable or even fraudulent projects.

The profit-sharing token mechanism is the complete opposite of the ICO model; only transactions that actually generate tips will result in payments, meaning that token-holding developers can only receive tip income after the product is launched. This is a mature business model.

Once the PST token is listed on exchanges, community members can become holders of that token by purchasing it, betting on and sharing in the future success of the application. At this point, investors are buying a reliable and predictable micro-dividend, received in real-time daily, and can be sold for cash in the secondary market.

Furthermore, Arweave has proposed a Profit Sharing Community (PSC), where developers reward PST tokens for specific tasks, and contributors can take on tasks they are interested in and skilled at, earning PST tokens that represent shares and rights to profits from the application upon completion.

Through this method, these applications can widely attract external contributors while distributing the project's PST equity tokens to active community builders.

Users who want to participate in building the Arweave Profit Sharing Community PSC can claim tasks here, with categories currently including bugs, design, functionality, etc.

What are the Profit Sharing Communities PSC?

Currently, applications created based on the Arweave protocol have surpassed 250, including content distribution platforms, social platforms, file storage solutions, developer tools, archiving bots, decentralized exchanges, and more.

Financial Applications

Verto (Popular Application)

Verto is a decentralized exchange built on the Verto Protocol, created by the development team th8ta, currently still in ALPHA testing.

Verto is a decentralized exchange specifically for trading PST tokens based on Arweave, and has already launched 10 types of PST tokens. Verto has also released a scenario mining tool Astatine, which allows creators of profit-sharing communities to reward profit-sharing tokens to early adopters and supporters.

Recently, Verto added support for Ethereum bridging, allowing users to purchase profit-sharing tokens PST with one click. Specifically, the Ethereum bridge will allow users to exchange ETH, AR, and any PST tokens on the Verto exchange. Additionally, the new bridge will allow holders of the Verto native token VRT to earn transaction fees priced in Ethereum.

As one of the ecological projects of the Arweave protocol, Verto recently secured Pre-A round financing, with investors including 1kx, Variant, the Arweave team, Liquidity Ventures, Alex Pack, Jack Herrick, Thomas Bailey, Scott Moore, Garrett MacDonald, and Rob Chan.

The development team th8ta recently released the arweave.js library, enabling an Arweave wallet experience similar to MetaMask.

everPay

everPay is a trusted cross-chain settlement protocol built on the Arweave network, constructed using a storage-based computing paradigm. everPay locks crypto assets from other public chains in smart contracts and maps them to corresponding assets, enabling users to transfer and make payments based on specific protocols. everPay's transaction costs are very low, with thousands of transactions costing only $0.05. Additionally, everPay has no TPS restrictions; the TPS size depends on the application architecture and server performance of each protocol.

everPay has just released its Beta version.

Limestone

Limestone is a decentralized oracle that provides price data for multiple financial protocols and offers a solution for reasonably priced financial data storage, efficient query processing, and permanent availability for the Arweave network.

Limestone's staking mechanism ensures a robust and fair dispute resolution solution and incentivizes community members to evaluate reports and report errors. Limestone can even achieve cross-chain bridging and link user identities.

Content Distribution Applications

Mirror.xyz

Mirror.xyz is a content publishing product created by former a16z crypto partner Denis Nazarov, combining DAO, Web3, and NFT to build an ownership economy model. It provides a set of crowdfunding tools for content creators, addressing the issue of creators "not earning money and unable to monetize the value of their content." Early investors can even earn future revenue from content through their keen insights.

Mirror uses Arweave to store data, achieving permanent storage, including all content published by creators and all related changes, as well as all information needed to verify the authenticity of the author's identity. Arweave not only provides permanent data storage functionality but also requires a one-time payment upon the first upload.

The platform has recently migrated its registered token Mirror Write Token (WRITE) to the mainnet.

This is a content crowdfunding platform that combines NFT and ownership economy, with significant "out-of-circle potential." It could have a revolutionary impact on the field of content creation and distribution. For a detailed introduction to the product, you can refer to: "We See the Revolution of Content Creation and the Dawn of the Web 3 Era from the New Product Mirror."

ArcLight

ArcLight is a peer-to-peer music and audio content distribution platform built on the Arweave network. Creators can use ArcLight to upload encrypted content (including singles, albums, podcasts, and sound effects) and set their own prices for downloads, eliminating centralized intermediaries in the traditional music industry.

Bandplay

Bandplay is a community-owned music platform where music lovers can fund their favorite musicians. Additionally, if they believe in the future success of a particular music piece, they can invest in it.

Myco

Myco is a community-owned communication publishing platform that can be owned and governed by users. Furthermore, Myco provides a set of tools to facilitate the creation and distribution of value owned by users' communities.

OpenBits

OpenBits is an open-source software package publishing platform aimed at providing a more diverse way of rewarding open-source contributors.

W3Stream

W3Stream is a video streaming platform based on the Arweave network. Content creators can directly receive rewards from viewers for their works, while supporters share part of the creator's income.

Storage and Archiving Applications

Permanent Archives (Popular Application)

Permanent Archives is dedicated to capturing important political and historical information from the Arweave permanent network. The first dataset was stored in January 2021, containing 12GB of images, videos, and streaming data from Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch related to the events of January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. Access to this content can be obtained by visiting app.ardrive.io and appending the following drive ID "afa4f6e1--2401--46e1-ae2e-0d84926394e9."

ArDrive (Popular Application)

ArDrive is a fully functional permanent file storage application, a decentralized version of Dropbox, featuring privacy and censorship resistance, providing a more secure permanent data storage solution.

Sarcophagus (Popular Application)

Sarcophagus is a smart contract network hosted on Arweave that allows users to create universal, self-controlled, digital versions of dead man's switches, providing a defense mechanism against digital threats. Use cases for Sarcophagus include storing wills and testament documents as well as password recovery.

A dead man's switch is a switch that automatically activates when the operator loses the ability to act, such as in the case of death, loss of consciousness, or leaving control of a device. Originally applied to vehicles or machines, it has since been used in virtual domains such as computer software.

Permabot

Permabot is a Twitter bot service dedicated to archiving tweet content, not just URLs. Once archived, this content will be permanently stored on the Arweave network, and users can access it at any time. The public beta version of Permabot will be released in the first quarter of 2021.

Gitopia

Gitopia is a decentralized version of code repository service, ensuring that developers' code will never be lost or damaged maliciously or accidentally. Gitopia, previously known as dgit, is currently used by most profit-sharing communities to host open-source code repositories. Additionally, the code repositories of the Arweave development team are also mapped to Gitopia.

Nest.Land

Nest.Land is a completely decentralized community project that supports publishing permanent, undeletable Deno module registries on the Arweave network. By leveraging Arweave's permanent storage capabilities, Nest.Land provides developers with a truly reliable storage solution and access to important Deno packages.

Infrastructure Tools

Amplify

Amplify is a decentralized economic solution based on the Arweave gateway, aimed at providing incentives for trusted gateway operators. As an Arweave gateway consensus protocol, the Amplify protocol ensures the effective operation of trusted gateways through staking and voting mechanisms and can increase query speeds on Arweave by over 20 times.

ArGo

ArGo is a permanent deployment tool that allows developers to deploy permanent applications with one click, supporting Angular & Next web applications and DNS integration. ArGo supports collaboration, automation, and can integrate with GitHub and GitLab, allowing for one-stop maintenance of multiple development versions of applications and tracking logs, ensuring they can never be changed or lost.

ArGo is still in Beta, with over 100 developer users and more than 200 dapps deployed.

CommunityXYZ

CommunityXYZ is a decentralized dashboard and governance platform specifically for profit-sharing community projects, where project founders can create and manage communities, publish specific tasks that offer PST token rewards, and potential contributors can take on and complete tasks to earn rewards.

Koi

Koi is a data layer protocol for building open-source libraries, employing an attention incentive mechanism to promote contributions to the permanent network.

Verification Services

ArVerify

ArVerify is a real identity verification tool that can verify whether an account is a real person, a fake, or a bot. With just one line of code, ArVerify can be easily integrated into existing DApps.

Feather

Feather is a cloud computing solution based on the Arweave permanent network, allowing developers to execute code using cloud services securely, with economic incentives for executing the code.

fQR Weave

fQR Weave is an anti-counterfeiting solution that combines QR codes and Arweave permanent storage, currently having obtained over 7,000 academic certifications.

WeaveID

WeaveID is an Arweave wallet solution that allows users to log into their Arweave wallet using an email address and password. This means users can log into applications from any device using WeaveID without dealing with key files. For developers, adding WeaveID to applications takes only a few minutes.

Social Media

Decent.Land

Decent.Land is a new type of social network platform based on the Arweave permanent network, currently under development, where users can join the network by registering on the waiting list.

Recently, the historical event of Tesla investing $1.5 billion in Bitcoin has been permanently stored through Decent.Land.

On February 22, decent.land released the decentland-js API, allowing users to interact with the DecentLand protocol using this API.

Since all applications on the Arweave network are open protocols, any permanent application on this network can access decent.land and grow its user base. Through the profit-sharing community model, this will bring revenue to the protocol developers from the integrations.

squad.vision

squad.vision is a social network protocol based on the Arweave permanent network, also developed by the team behind Verto Exchange, th8ta.

Based on this protocol, users can generate their own PST token QUAD. Once a user follows another user, a PST token is automatically minted and sent to the other party; when a user posts, an NFT is generated that can be co-owned by multiple QUAD token holders and can also be sold to other users; if someone likes the post, QUAD token holders can earn income in the form of tips.

Whether it's liking, following, or creating content, squad.vision can assign value to these actions, making them a scarce resource. This means users are incentivized to only follow people who are valuable to them or who will follow them back; it means users can become shareholders of other community members, and social actions can generate income. As a community ownership experiment, all profit-sharing tokens QUAD will be airdropped to users holding more than 0.1 AR.

DAO

ARCA DAO

ARCA DAO is a DAO organization within the Arweave network that operates independently, with members being long-term miners, developers, and supporters from the Arweave community. Its goal is to coordinate, plan, and allocate funds for projects and plans that will benefit the Arweave community in the long run. ARCA DAO currently has 17 senior community members, with membership not fixed; new members can join, and old members can leave. The core Arweave team has donated 25,000 DAI to ARCA DAO and provided follow-up funding.

Financing Status

So far, Arweave has completed multiple rounds of financing, including investments from prominent crypto funds.

Early investors in Arweave include 1kx and Techstars. In June 2018, Arweave raised $8.7 million through an ICO.

In November 2019, Arweave completed a $5 million financing round, led by crypto asset investment firm a16z, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Multicoin Capital.

In March 2020, Arweave completed a new round of $8.3 million financing, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Union Square Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures, who led the previous $5 million financing round. The funds from this round will be used to expand Arweave's community ecosystem building plans.

In February 2021, venture capital firm Version One Ventures announced its investment in Arweave, with the investment amount undisclosed.

Arweave has always placed great emphasis on supporting the developer ecosystem, including incubators and funding programs. Recently, Arweave announced the launch of the six-week open network incubator Open Web Foundry starting March 1, where participating projects can receive expert-level training and support, as well as the opportunity to receive a total of $100,000 in official investments and investment amounts from other investors in the Arweave ecosystem. Winning projects will be submitted by the Arweave core team to Gitcoin for selection by April 9, after which the official team will negotiate investments with each project and its founders individually.

As the developer ecosystem grows, more web applications will emerge on the Arweave protocol. These applications based on the Arweave protocol are referred to as "Profit Sharing Applications." Like Arweave, these applications have specific attributes, including permanence, being token-based, community governance, and shared economic incentives among developers and users in the community, allowing them to share in the future success of the community and its applications.