Commemorate now
In Arweave’s 2023 semi-annual report released earlier this month, SCP Ventures captured 940 million transaction data. At that time, it was expected to break the 1 billion mark in August. Unexpectedly, with the surge in transaction volume, the second half of the year got off to a good start - the cumulative number of transactions on the Arweave network has officially exceeded 1 billion.
This is the second milestone after Arweave’s network size exceeded 100PB. As founder Sam said, this is a historic achievement in the 6 years since Arweave was established and the 5 years since the mainnet was launched!
Among the factors that contributed to this achievement, the ANS-104 standard specifies the Bundle standard, which allows the network to handle different types of data such as transactions, transfers, data uploads, etc. in a more flexible and powerful way. Without the Bundle standard, the entire network may only have half of its current transaction volume. Arweave has now completed its historical mission while saving users 50% of their fees.
Bundlr and Arseeding are the leaders among them. Bundlr reached a new peak of 5.9 million transactions per day, and Arseeding will continue to work closely with tools such as KNN3, Adot and 4everland to create better developer services.
Arweave's goal is to provide a reliable, secure, and permanent storage solution that enables users to save important data on the network and ensure that it will never be lost or tampered with.
With Arweave, users can permanently store various types of data on the network, such as documents, audio, video, pictures, etc. Compared with traditional cloud storage solutions, Arweave provides higher reliability and security because the data is stored in a distributed blockchain network and cannot be tampered with or deleted.
This is fundamentally different from existing storage projects, whether traditional centralized, cloud storage vendors, or competitors in the Web3 field. Any file uploaded to Arweave can be securely stored for at least 200 years.
But this is just the function of Arweave that people usually remember. The next step will be to shift from "cold storage" to "hot computing", and data will gain more vitality and economic value.
Before that, let’s look back at the source of Arweave’s progress:
let time pass by
Arweave’s usage has been bleak for a long time, and the value of permanent storage has not been widely accepted and recognized by the market. The development of Arweave can be divided into three stages:
Before August 2021, Arweave was just one of the projects in the decentralized storage track. Although it received large amounts of financing, the overall ecosystem and projects had not really grown; from August 2021 to August 2022, there was the first small peak in usage. During this stage, Bundlr began to promote network usage. The earliest code submission record that can be traced back to July 4, 2021; from August 2022 to the present, the Arweave network has begun to grow explosively, and most notably, this was achieved in the context of a bear market. Among them, the version 2.6 upgrade that came into effect in March 2023 allowed mechanical hard drives to participate in mining, lowering the threshold for access to the network.
Arweave 2.6 focuses on two aspects: one is to reduce the energy consumption of Arweave to store data to improve the efficiency of the storage market; the other is to incentivize miners to store more data, especially rare data backups and data types with heavy space requirements such as audio and video.
Specifically, it will include the following four specific measures:
By encouraging miners to use cheaper hard drives to store data instead of continuing to increase transmission speeds, the average cost of Arweave storage is reduced; by incentivizing miners to back up more complete copies of Arweave mainnet data, faster information indexing can be established to achieve a more "distributed" data backup network; allowing more mining power to be invested in truly useful data types to reduce energy waste in the network and avoid excessive spam in exchange for AR tokens; allowing storage costs to be estimated at dynamic prices in the Arweave network, thereby guiding miners to shift to higher-value data type storage and improve network fault tolerance.
It turns out that all these efforts have paid off, and the Arweave network has been chosen by more projects as their own data storage solution. The most typical one is the Lens Protocol, which migrates data to the Arweave network.
In addition, Arweave's ecological infrastructure is no longer barren. everVision has built the universal payment protocol everPay and the 0 Gas Fee DEX Permaswap based on the SCP paradigm. It relies on off-chain computing + on-chain settlement to achieve transaction speeds consistent with traditional centralized exchanges. The idea of UniswapX is highly similar to it.
Arweave’s next goal can only be to serve the next 100 million users, break away from internal competition, and move towards a more mainstream market space.
Looking ahead
Arweave has entered the era of large-scale applications. The next step of blockchain will not be limited to the field of simple financial transactions. Broader scenarios require more complex infrastructure to support them.
As mentioned earlier, simple cold storage needs to be transformed, and more complex hot computing will become the main theme. Whether it is Permaweb, general database DB3, or Mind Network, the encryption layer for the entire communication process, they are all new ways of applying network services.
It is also with the help of the rich ecological dApp that the Arweave network has gradually grown into a towering tree, and the next step will focus on continuing to lower the threshold for user participation:
Participation with lower threshold: The use of Arweave will continue to be simplified. Users do not need to install the Arweave mainnet. They only need to purchase a certain number of AR tokens on everPay to participate in transactions, storage and development. Compared with the traditional Internet, Arweave will remove the participation threshold and attract more ordinary users and traditional users to participate; Update the reward mechanism: Arweave has innovated the mining mechanism to incentivize users to participate in transactions. Users can now use $U to obtain AR token rewards by storing and transmitting data. Whether it is direct interaction with the Arweave network or using light nodes such as Arseeding, it will be directly returned to the end user; Stimulate the activity of the community: Arweave has multiple active communities. For example, PermaDAO is holding the Arweave Summer Asia Hackathon to encourage developers to participate in and use Arweave. In addition, Community Labs is also actively developing a low-threshold wallet toolkit and sharing it with the community; Development of the application ecosystem: Arweave's application ecosystem is also growing and expanding, covering multiple fields and industries. Taking Mind Network as an example, it has introduced the zero-trust mechanism into Arweave, decoupling data storage and computing, and making full use of the excellent characteristics of Arweave's cold storage.
Secondly, it will help boost the continued prosperity of the creator economy, truly liberate individuals from the profit deprivation and censorship of traditional centralized institutions, and return free will to everyone. For example, UDL (Uniform Data Protocol) will provide Web3 content creators with an effective on-chain standard for content distribution, incentive setting, and permission management, allowing creators to become the real subject of content creation and distributing the platform advantages of centralized institutions to each individual;
Of course, Arweave’s development is not perfect yet, but as an “Old School” project that has gone through two bull and bear cycles, Arweave still maintains sufficient innovation capabilities and has not fallen into silence. We firmly believe that the Arweave network will become the infrastructure of the entire future world and illuminate human civilization like the Library of Alexandria.
