Intro to Arweave, a blockchain cloud storage platform

Arweave is a decentralized cloud storage solution that aims to upend the traditional storage market using blockchain with the option of one-time payments plus added security benefits.

If it succeeds, Arweave could become a top chain in the Web 3.0 world. In this article, we’ll explain what Arweave aims to do. To find out more about the blockchain cloud storage and the project’s long-term potential, you can read this more advanced article here.

What is Arweave?

Arweave aims to create a system where a user can pay once to store their data forever. To do this, it has created the Storage Endowment to ensure permanent storage on the network. When a piece of data is written to the Arweave network, users pay an upfront fee and incur interest in the form of storage purchasing power.

Arweave has also developed a REST API to develop various file storage applications, thus creating its ecosystem.

What are Arweave’s Innovations?

Business Model

Whereas Filecoin’s business model is similar to traditional centralized cloud services, establishing a pay-as-you-go contract between users and storage providers, Arweave solves the problem of long-term data storage with a pay-once-store-forever business model.

Operational Network

Permaweb is the operational network for Arweave’s ecosystem of DApps. It provides developers with great flexibility and makes DApp development easier. Developers only need to use a standard API based on the stored consensus paradigm to develop, without any programming language limitation.

Community Incentive Model

Using Blockweave data structure, Arweave’s miners only need to store part of the historical blocks to start mining immediately, lowering the mining threshold.

The endowment pool incentivizes miners to store data for a long time and profit-sharing allows developers to share revenue.

Data Storage Integrity

Innovative integration of DApp front-end and smart contracts into one, front-end data and contract data as a whole.

The innovative new standard for Atomic NFT allows NFT minting and the actual content is stored as a whole on the chain.

Node Allocation

Arwearve has over 1200 nodes worldwide, with most located in China.

Growth

The Arweave ecosystem grew to nearly 40 TB of data storage in 2021.

Arweave gateway data usage as a whole is rising month by month, with occasional large-scale data usage.

Deep Partnership with Solana

Solana generates up to 4 PB of data (or 4,096 TB) per year.

Arweave and Solana have partnered to launch SOLAR Bridge, officially available in 2021. SOLAR Bridge is tailored to enable Solana to store Arweave’s permanent network data, thus creating a decentralized, easily accessible, and publicly available storage solution that can handle tremendous scalability.

Arweave has a similar growth trend to the Solana token price by becoming the official Solana storage solution.

Token Performance

AR, Arweave’s token, started from $2.63 at the beginning of the year and grew to $5.38 at the end of 2021, a 21-fold price increase.

Price of Storage

To be able to store files on Arweave, developers create a transaction to pay a certain number of AR tokens as a network fee (currently $0.01/MB) to store data forever. At the same time, the low-end package of Amazon S3 charges $0.000023/MB per month. It will take 40 years for each Arweave user to break even. That means Arweave users are paying a premium for permanent storage.

If the token price goes up, the cost of storage will be even higher, with even more time needed to break even.

Summary

Arweave, the Web 3.0 storage infrastructure, is a decentralized cloud storage solution that solves the problem of storing data in perpetuity over time. Its network and application architecture supports development and data storage as a whole, creating a native blockchain data solution.

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