Author: PermaDAO
In the semi-annual report of Arweave network at the beginning of this month, it captured 940 million transaction data and expected to exceed 1 billion in August. However, the transaction volume surged and exceeded 1 billion in the second half of the year. This is another important milestone for the Arweave network, and it is not far from the 100PB scale. The promotion of the ANS-104 standard plays a key role in enabling the network to handle different types of data more flexibly and powerfully. Tools such as Bundlr and Arseeding have also made significant contributions, with Bundlr setting a record of 5.9 million transactions in a single day.
Current Commemoration
In the semi-annual report of Arweave 2023 at the beginning of this month, SCP Ventures captured 940 million transaction data, and at that time it was expected to exceed 1 billion in August. Unexpectedly, under the surge in transaction volume, the second half of the year started well – the cumulative number of transactions on the Arweave network has officially exceeded 1 billion.
- Relay in IBC Analysis of Cost, Incentives, and Channel Upgradeability
- Analyzing the Core Pool Flywheel of Balancer Empowering Pools to Drive Their Own Development
- Understanding Bacalhau 1.0 in One Article Unleashing the Potential of Private Data
This is the second milestone after the Arweave network’s scale surpassed 100PB. As founder Sam said, this is a historic achievement since the inception of Arweave six years ago and the launch of the main network five years ago!
Among the factors that contributed to this achievement, the ANS-104 standard defines the Bundle standard, allowing the network to handle transactions, transfers, data uploads, and other types of data in a more flexible and powerful way. Without the Bundle standard, the entire network may only have half of the current transaction volume, achieving twice the result with half the effort. Now, Arweave has completed its historical mission while saving users 50% of the cost.
Bundlr and Arseeding are outstanding among them. Bundlr reached a new peak of 5.9 million transactions in a single day, while Arseeding will continue to cooperate with tools such as KNN3, Adot, and 4everland to create better developer services.
The goal of Arweave is to provide a reliable, secure, and permanent storage solution that allows users to store important data on the network and ensure that it is never lost or tampered with.
Through Arweave, users can permanently store various types of data on the network, such as documents, audio, video, images, etc. Compared to 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 fundamentally differs from existing storage projects, whether they are traditional centralized cloud storage providers or competitors in the Web3 field. Any file uploaded to Arweave can be securely stored for at least 200 years.
But this is only the functionality of Arweave that people usually remember. Next, it will transition from “cold storage” to “hot computing”, and data will gain more vitality and economic value.
Before that, let’s trace the origins of Arweave:
Bygone Memories
Arweave’s usage was once long and bleak, and the value of permanent storage was not widely accepted and recognized by the market. The development of Arweave can be divided into three stages:
-
Prior to August 2021, Arweave was just one of the decentralized storage projects, although it had received a large amount of financing, the overall ecosystem and project did not truly grow;
-
From August 2021 to August 2022, the first small peak in usage occurred, during this phase Bundlr began to promote network usage, and the earliest code commit record can be traced back to July 4, 2021;
-
From August 2022 to the present, the Arweave network has experienced explosive growth, and the most notable aspect is that this was achieved against the backdrop of a bear market. In particular, the 2.6 version upgrade that took effect in March 2023 allowed mechanical hard drives to participate in mining, lowering the entry barrier.
The focus of Arweave 2.6 is on two aspects: first, reducing the energy consumption of Arweave’s data storage to improve the efficiency of the storage market; second, incentivizing miners to store more data, especially rare data backups and data types with heavy space requirements such as audio and video.
Specifically, it will mainly include the following four measures:
-
By encouraging miners to use cheaper hard drives to store data instead of continuing to improve transmission speed, the average cost of Arweave storage is reduced;
-
By incentivizing miners to back up more complete copies of Arweave’s mainnet data, faster indexing of information can be achieved to create a more “distributed” data backup network;
-
Allowing more mining power to be devoted to truly useful data types in order to reduce energy waste in the network and avoid excessive garbage information in exchange for AR tokens;
-
Allowing cost estimation of storage costs in the Arweave network at dynamic prices, thereby guiding miners to focus on storing higher-value data types and improving network fault tolerance.
These efforts have proven not to be in vain, and the Arweave network has been chosen by more projects as their data storage solution. The most typical example is the Lens Protocol, which has migrated its data to the Arweave network.
In addition, Arweave’s ecosystem infrastructure is no longer barren. everVision has built the universal payment protocol everLianGuaiy, as well as the 0 Gas Fee DEX Permaswap based on the SCP paradigm, which relies on off-chain computation + on-chain settlement to achieve transaction speeds consistent with traditional centralized exchanges. The approach of UniswapX is highly similar to this.
Arweave’s next goal can only be to serve the next hundred 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, and the next step for blockchain will not be limited to the field of pure financial transactions. Broader scenarios require more complex infrastructure to support them.
As mentioned earlier, simple cold storage needs to change, and more complex hot computation will become the main theme. Whether it is Permaweb, general database DB3, or the communication encryption layer Mind Network, they are all new ways of network service applications.
It is also under the promotion of a rich ecosystem of dApps that the Arweave network has gradually grown into a towering tree, and the next step will focus on continuing to reduce the user participation threshold:
-
Lower participation threshold: The usage 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 everLianGuaiy to participate in transactions, storage, and development. Compared to the traditional internet, Arweave will remove participation barriers and attract more ordinary and traditional users to participate;
-
Updated reward mechanism: Arweave has innovated its mining mechanism to incentivize user participation in transactions. Users can now use $U to earn AR tokens as rewards for storing and transmitting data. Whether it is direct interaction with the Arweave network or using lightweight nodes like Arseeding, it will be directly returned to end users;
-
Stimulating community activity: Arweave has multiple active communities. For example, PermaDAO is hosting the Arweave Summer Asia Hackathon to encourage developers to participate in and use Arweave. In addition, Community Labs is also actively developing low-threshold wallet toolkits and sharing them with the community;
-
Development of application ecosystem: Arweave’s application ecosystem is also constantly expanding and growing, covering multiple sectors and industries. For example, Mind Network has introduced a zero-trust mechanism into Arweave, decoupling data storage and computation, fully utilizing the excellent features of Arweave’s cold storage.
Next is the continuous prosperity of the creator economy, truly liberating individuals from the profit deprivation and censorship of traditional centralized institutions, and returning freedom of will to everyone. For example, UDL (Unified Data Protocol) will provide Web3 content creators with an effective on-chain standard for content distribution, incentive settings, and permission management, allowing creators to become the true subjects of content creation and dispersing the platform advantages of centralized institutions to each individual;
Of course, Arweave’s development is not yet perfect, but as an “Old School” project that has experienced 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 definitely become the foundation of the entire future world, shining on human civilization like the Library of Alexandria.
Like what you're reading? Subscribe to our top stories.
We will continue to update Gambling Chain; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!
