summary: Arweave is a decentralized data storage protocol that leverages blockchain technology storing it permanently.
content: Arweave is a decentralized data storage protocol that leverages blockchain technology to enable permanent and sustainable data storage through a serverless web. It is described as a global, permanent hard drive with a new type of storage that allows users and developers to truly store data securely forever. AR is a native cryptocurrency of the Arweave network and it is used to incentivize participants in the network. History Arweave was founded as a start-up Archana in early 2017 by Sam Williams and William Jones. The Archaic was rebranded as Arweave while completing the start-up acceleration and mentorship program conducted by Techstars Berlin Accelerators, Germany. In April of 2018, Arweave graduated from the program, weaving itself a network of advisors and collaborators. Company and Team Arweave is registered by the name, Minimum Spanning Technologies Limited in the United Kingdom. It has a headquarter located in London, UK, and currently has 11-50 employees. Founder Sam Williams is also the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company. He has done Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Kent and has worked as a Technical advisor at Minespider. William Jones was Chief Technology Officer (CTO) when Arweave was founded and he left in August 2018. Jesper Noehr joined Arweave as a new CTO in December 2019. The other notable team members include- | Name | Designation | Ref | | ---- | ----------- | --- | | Sam Williams | Co-Founder & CEO | | | William Jones | Co-Founder | | | Jesper Noehr | CTO | | | India Raybould | Chief Coordinating Officer (CCO) | | | Viktor Diordiiev | Chief commercial officer (CCO) | | | Sebastian Campos Groth | Chief operating officer (COO) | | | Kyle Beckles | Head of Product | | Fundraising Arweave has raised a total of USD 22 million over 6 funding rounds so far till date. It raised an undisclosed amount of funds in a couple of pre-seed rounds in Q4 2017 and Q1 2018. In June 2018, the team raised little more than USD 8,700,000 through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) round. The ICO round was backed by Arrington XRP Capital, 1kx, Benjamin Kong, and Coefficient Ventures Grand Renfield One. On November 6, 2019, Arweave secured USD 5M in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and contributions from Union Square Ventures, Multicoin Capital, and a16z Crypto. In another seed round on March 5, 2019, led by Andreessen Horowitz and participation from Coinbase Ventures and a16z Crypto, they raised a total of l USD 8 million. Their latest funding was raised on Dec 1, 2020, from an ICO round backed by Karnika Yashwant. Initial coin offering Arweave ICO started on June 3, 2018, and within 4 days it raised a total of l USD 8,700,000. The AR token was priced at 0.73 USD and 20.6% of the total supply was available for the round. Before that, the team conducted a pre-sale in march 2018. Overview As mentioned in the introduction, Arweave is a decentralized data storage protocol built on the blockchain to enable permanent and sustainable data storage for everyone. It describes itself as a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets and It enables users to remember and securely preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. Preserving history, o prevents others from manipulating or rewriting it. Arweave learned a lesson from all of the knowledge lost in the burning Library of Alexandria. From Plato's writings which had to be rediscovered to the dreadful rewriting of history in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arweave is taking from the past to ensure that all of the recorded human knowledge is captured for posterity. By levleveragingecentralized and censorship-resistant technology susuchlockchain Arweave aims to protect data from this kind of unfortunate incidents and manipulations and preserve it permanently. It addresses problems such as faulty storage architectures and solutions, mishandling the data, maandmanipulatingg and rewriting the history associated with centralized storage solutions. It wants to protect and preserve the sum of human knowledge from the complications that occur from centralized power. Thbuiltlt-in redundancy removes the possibility of human error. It proposes several technical innovations, including BHL, WL, BlockWeave, Proof of Access, Wildfire, and Blocand shadows to not only efficiently store massive quantities of data as immutably but also address existing blockchain issues. In addition, it creates crypto-economic incentives for miners to replicate as much data as possible. Their storage costs are covered innovatively, with an up-front fee whose interest accrual perpetually covers the cost of storage over time. All the incentives and transactionstransactionid in native token AR. Arweave forms a network that connects those with disk space to spare with those who need permanent data storage. This system offers unparalleled levels of data replication and security for users, as well as financial incentives for those storing data, without a middleman. Through decentralization, It offers a new standard of data archiving and storage in which information is globally replicated on hundreds of machines, unaffected by fire, flood, or intentional damage. After conducting multiple testnets in Q1 2018, the first version of the mainnet was launched on June 8, 2018, with a select group of 1800 hand-picked participants across various countries. Technology Arweave is a complementary system to the Internet, using the blockchain approach to permanently store data, which cannot be changed, and using token incentives to achieve sustainability. To achieve its decentralized storage goal and also solve current blockchain problems such as scalability, slow performance, and high transaction fees, it introduced technologies including BlockWeave, Proof of Access, Wildfire, BHL, Welland, and Band lacks shadows. These innovations complement each other to the Arweave solution. Block weaves Block weaares is the core technology on which, Arweave is based. This differs in structure from standard blockchains like Bitcoin or Litecoin. In a typical blockchain network like bitcoin, a chain is formed by linking blocks linearly containing transactions while, a block weave is a set of blocks that contain data, linking to multiple previous blocks from the network. In this way, BlockWeave is more of a data structure than a chain. This data structure allows the network to force a criterion that miners provide a ‘Proof of Access’ (PoA) to old data to add new blocks. Doing this reduces miner costs and also allows more on-chain storage. In the Areweave network, each block is linked to two prior blocks: the previous block in the ’chain’(similar to blockchain) and a block from the previous history of the blockchain (the ’recall block’). So this doesn't form a linear chain like other blockchains but ins, head it forms a slightly more complex graph structure known as block weave. The 'recall block' selection depends on thethesh of the previous block and the previous block’s height. This results in a deterministic approach, but the unpredictable choice of the block from the weave’s block history. Proof of Access The Arweave network uses a Proof of Access (PoA) consensus mechanism to validate blocks before adding to the structure. Proof of Access is an enhancement of Proof-of-work (PoW). A typical PoW system generates the next block only based on the previous block, but the PoA algorithm combines the data of the previous block to randomly select a recall block. As mentioned earlier, It is determined by getting the hash value of the current block and calculating its modulus relative to the height of the current block, ”, which is to be merged into the next block. This gives miners an advantage that they don’t have to store all the blocks (forming a blockchain) which ultimately helps to use storage space efficiently. To achieve PoA, the miners need access to random blocks from the block weaves history to mine new blocks and so they are incentivized in the form of mining rewards to mine successfully. The PoA algorithm also rewards miners to store ‘rare’ blocks more than it incentivizes them to store well-replicated blocks. This is because when a 'rare block' is chosen, miners with access to it compete amongst a smaller number of miners in the PoW puzzle for the same level of reward. As a consequence of this, miners earn more for storing rare blocks on average compared to the t. Upgrade to SPoRA In a recent development, on February 24th, the Arweave network upgraded to use the Succinct Random Proofs of Access (SPoRA) consensus mechanism. It is a new type of consensus mechanism and until block 633720, Arweave was running Proof of Access (PoA). Block 633719 was the last PoA block on the Arweave network before the upgrade and The first SPoRA block mined is 633720. This upgrade will achieve two things, First, SPoRA will make data retrieval more competitive. It will achieve that by improving incentives for retrieval miners for replicating data more efficiently and more swiftly, ending the era of CPU domination. In simwordsorks, SPoRA will make block weave more decentralized and efficient by disincentivizing resource pooling among CPUs. Secondly, It will reduce the energy required to maintain the network. SPoRA’s architecture requires less energy to maintain, resulting not only in lower overhead for miners but in a cleaner and more efficient system overall. This architecture is a more elegant alignment between resource spending and utility. Black shadows Black shadows is a new approach to data distribution and it speed