What is Arweave?

Today we are going to talk about Arweave, a decentralized storage network designed with the objective of providing a platform that provides indefinite data storage. The Arweave protocol combines a new data structure called "blockweave" and a new consensus mechanism called Proof of Access.

What is Arweave?

Arweave is a decentralized data storage protocol that raises the idea about indefinite data storage. They define themselves as “a perpetual collectively owned hard drive” and sustainable, with a single upfront payment fee. The protocol works by connecting people who have extra space on their hard drives with individuals and organizations that require permanent data storage or content hosting. As a practical example we can see how Glovo connects customer orders with restaurants. In the case of Arweave, a decentralized network is used, such as Ethereum, where the stored data is backed by a sustainable endowment which ensures that they are available in perpetuity with resistance to censorship. In addition to the Arweave protocol, the concept of the permaweb is proposed: a global website that provides ownership to the community in which anyone can contribute or receive payment for staying in it. The permaweb looks like the traditional web, but all content, from images, videos, documents, to entire web applications, is permanent, retrieves quickly, and remains decentralized indefinitely.

What is Arweave technology like?

The Arweave protocol combines a new data structure called "blockweave" and a new consensus mechanism called Proof of Access. As the name suggests, the blockweave protocol uses a block-based structure in which each block is linked to two blocks:

• The oldest block in the Arweave blockchain.
• The recovery block, a randomly selected block within the protocol history. The recovery block is determined by taking the hash of the current block and calculating its modulus with respect to the height of the current block.

Miners need to provide hashes of the previous two blocks to create a new block and get the block reward in the form of an Arweave native token (AR).

Who is part of the Arweave team

The founding team is made up of Sam Williams and William Jones, two PhD candidates in Philosophy at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. The project was first announced as Archain in August 2017, then changed its name to Arweave in February 2018 and officially launched in June 2018. Williams landed at the company bringing his experience in decentralized and distributed systems. As part of his studies he developed an operating system called HydrOS, but ultimately decided to drop out of graduate school to focus all his time and energy on the project. Jones focused on devoting time to the studies he was carrying out on graph theory and neural networks, to such an extent that Jones abandoned the project in mid-2018, around the time of the project's official launch. Ultimately, Jones achieved his Doctor of Philosophy degree. According to Williams himself, the concept behind the project occurred to him while he was walking one day in the mountains of Scotland and he immediately contacted Jones, with whom he developed the technical details. 

What is Arweave (AR) token

The native token of the Arweave protocol is recognized by the AR ticker. It is a utility token used to make payments required to add data to the Arweave network, where it can be accessed through the use of web browsers on the Arweave permaweb. Users pay the cost that Arweave has predicted will be enough to store the data forever. It currently has a maximum supply of 66 million AR tokens, but instead has a total supply of 63.190.435, which tells us that there may be a portion of the supply that must have been reserved for grant programs. It currently has a circulating supply of 50,6% of the total, which is also a good sign if we look further and try to find out how many tokens will be released in the following months. It enjoys a market capitalization of $197 million and a fully diluted market capitalization of $387 million.

Pros and cons of Arweave

In favor of Arweave we can argue that data, a critical component of advanced technologies such as Machine Learning and AI, is the king of the 5000st century. The Arweave protocol is a robust blockchain network project that could potentially revolutionize the way online storage and data management works. It is capable of handling more than XNUMX transactions per second. Considering the complex consensus involved, this is quite a feat, so it could later host the Ethereum platform. In turn, the AR token has immense utility within the Arweave ecosystem, as well as a fairly stable historical price action. AR holders will benefit greatly from adopting the decentralized storage services that Arweave offers. On the other hand, we are skeptical about the protocol that addresses the problem of scalability when addressing the global market. If Arweave fails to fix the issues related to scalability, the project could suffer a downturn, resulting in a drastic drop in the price of the AR token. Arweave's innovative technologies are undoubtedly great and are required now more than ever. However, this could become a potential drawback due to the competition the project could attract; For example, competitors could come up with better and more feasible solutions based on Arweave Network.