In the storage race, after FIL, it's AR's turn.

Yesterday, the blockchain storage protocol Arweave released its public testnet, Arweave AO, which is designed for social media and AI computing layers. Subsequently, its native token AR saw consecutive price surges, with AR breaking through $24 at the time of writing, a 51% increase in 24 hours.

ChainFeeds founder Zhixiong Pan posted on X stating that "Arweave is the most promising encryption protocol to make large-scale decentralized data storage a reality. We live a life that is completely different from our ancestors, and the only reason is that we inherit and utilize the knowledge and experience accumulated by humans over tens of thousands of years. Perhaps this new technology will put an ENIAC in the revived Library of Alexandria."

So what is the mission that Arweave's testnet release wants to accomplish? And Arweave founder Williams even stated that Arweave AO is confident in competing with Ethereum, calling itself an "Ethereum competitor". What exactly is Arweave AO?

Large-scale + Verifiable, Arweave AO's Vision for Supercomputers

Arweave's mission is to provide "permanent information storage," a decentralized data storage protocol based on blockweave technology. The main network was launched in June 2018. Arweave utilizes BlockWeave's data structure and SPoRA's consensus mechanism to provide a new solution to the problem of permanent storage. Arweave offers a one-time payment for lifetime usage, eliminating the need for users to constantly subscribe. Arweave has also promised to provide users with at least 200 years of storage service.

And the Arweave AO testnet launched this time is a new method of "infinite" scalable blockchain to handle larger computing workloads. "AO is a super parallel computer, which is a distributed computing environment that allows you to run any number of processes in parallel. Previous decentralized computing systems either supported large-scale computing or supported verifiable computing. AO can do both at the same time," said Williams, founder of Arweave, in the announcement video.

This means that Arweave is beginning to enter the field of computing, similar to Ethereum's "supercomputer" concept. Arweave AO even allows AI and large language models (LLMs) to run directly in smart contracts.

During an interview, Williams stated that the difference between Arweave AO and other high-performance blockchains such as Aptos and Sui is its ability to support the storage of large amounts of data, such as AI models. "This is largely due to the fact that the core of the project is based on a data storage platform."

Decentralized database WeaveDB CEO Mardeni posted that Arweave's trading volume reached a historic high today, with TPS far exceeding most blockchains. As for the future performance of Arweave AO, we will wait and see.

However, before Arweave reached this point, it went through many exploratory processes.

Storage origins, Arweave's transformation journey

Arweave was founded in 2017 as a blockchain-based file storage protocol. It features one-time payment and permanent storage of files. Through a simple set of economic incentive rules, miners can store data for a long time. In 2021, there are already over 200 applications based on the Arweave network, covering various categories such as social networks, infrastructure, content distribution, and verification tools.

Over the next two years, Arweave's business data saw significant growth due to the development of the NFT market and Web3 creator economy. By the end of 2022, Arweave's data storage had nearly tripled compared to the same period the previous year, with a year-on-year growth of 192%. At that time, Arweave's 30-day network revenue was close to $300,000, ranking first among Web3 basic service protocols, far surpassing star storage and DePin projects such as Storj and Helium.

Related reading: "Reviewing the old to learn the new: Arweave's potential lies in reviving the Library of Alexandria, not as a substitute for Filecoin".

Source: https://viewblock.io/zh-CN/arweave/stat/cumulativeWeaveSize

However, after entering 2023, the growth of Arweave's storage business has significantly slowed down. As of the time of writing, the quality of Arweave's data storage is 157TB, with only a 30% increase in the past year. The revenue generated from storage business is also lower than before.

Source: https://web3index.org/

Left image: early 2022; Right image: early 2024

According to the 2023 Arweave Ecosystem Report written by the PermaDAO community, Arweave's overall network storage performance in 2023 was worse than in 2022, with a total of 32.96 TiB, a year-on-year decrease of 55.78%. In 2023, the monthly network storage fluctuated between 2-4 TiB, with the lowest network storage in June at only 1.43 TiB.

However, at the same time, the Arweave network was exceptionally active in 2023, and the growth of contracts was also a key indicator. The growth of contracts in 2023 saw a huge increase compared to 2022, with a year-on-year growth of 1063%.

These data indicators reflect the dilemma that Arweave is facing: although there are many projects using Arweave storage services, there are still relatively few projects developed entirely based on Arweave, making it difficult for Arweave to form network effects solely through its storage business. On the other hand, the rapidly growing new contracts also prove that Arweave still has considerable development prospects.

As we all know, low-cost on-chain storage is crucial for the success of blockchain and Web3. Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, revealed an astonishing cost comparison in a conversation with Philip Mataras, the founder of ArDrive: storing a 13 GB file on Arweave only costs $87, while storing the same data on Bitcoin would cost approximately $35,620,000 and on Ethereum would cost $780,000,000.

As a permanent storage project, Arweave is itself an arbitrarily visible, publicly transparent permanent storage network, and based on the storage consensus paradigm SCP, it is possible to achieve off-chain expansion without losing the finality of on-chain confirmation. As long as it conforms to the SCP expansion theory, it can be implemented as a part of Arweave to achieve specific functions.

It can be said that Arweave naturally does not have the problem of expansion. Azriel, the author of PermaDAO, believes that "it is only a matter of time for Arweave to move from behind the scenes to the front stage". The public chain has long faced the problem of computing and storage costs, and Arweave has already demonstrated its potential in promoting the comprehensive decentralization of DApps. Arweave's positioning is not only a decentralized storage platform, but also a Web3.0 full-stack protocol that supports the comprehensive decentralization of DApps.

After the release of Arweave AO, Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave, stated in an interview that "we have built a super parallel computer, a computer that can run any number of threads in parallel at the same time, and its scalability is incredible."

Not only the founder, but such a grand vision has always had believers in the Arweave community. Arweave is regarded by the community and developers as a data availability layer that directly meets the development needs of Dapps. In a 2022 space event, Xiong Wei, the founder of everFinance in the Arweave ecosystem, jokingly said that "Arweave's beginning is Ethereum's endgame."

It is difficult to conclude how much impact the launch of Arweave AO will have on the current public chain landscape. However, after nearly two years of planning, Arweave has completed the transition from a storage business to a Web3 full-stack protocol. Its 50% increase in 24-hour trading volume is already attracting attention. It is foreseeable that Arweave's entry will make the competition in the public chain landscape even more exciting.

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