Arweave

Arweave is a new type of storage that supports data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to store data forever – for the first time.

As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave allows us to indefinitely remember and retain valuable information, apps, and history. Maintaining history prevents others from rewriting it.

Arweave is built on four core technologies that work together. These innovations help Arweave to create low-cost, permanent storage on a new blockchain and high throughput. They are:

• Blockweave;
• Proof of Access;
• Wildfire;
• Blockshadows.

Although these technologies are intertwined, each plays a crucial role in creating a new type of network suitable for both fast transactions and low-cost persistent storage.

Arweave is a decentralized public data network and thus can never censor data access or the data itself, except for democratically rejected content. It means that developers are free to build on top of Arweave and can listen for incoming data using the REST API. As events are triggered, the listeners will fire the appropriate function calls of the clients subscribed to those events.

Developers don’t fear being throttled or shut down, as the network is incentivized to provide reliable access to the data feed. Application architectures can be designed so that information that needs to be stored and guaranteed tamper-proof can be easily implemented.

Furthermore, provably fair runtime code can be stored on the weave and interpreted directly by the client. The client can verify the payload from the weave before computation and be guaranteed that the code they are running is both trustless and provably fair, i.e., the same principle that other clients are running. It opens up interesting possesses for trustless random number generators, and other oracle-based services may serve other blockchain networks.

The Arweave protocol is made possible by using a new blockchain-like data structure called the blockweave; flexible size transaction block distribution via blockshadowing; a new consensus mechanism reducing dependency on proof of work called proof of access; and a self-optimizing network topology called wildfire. Much like the Bitcoin network, this technological advancement in isolation is not complex; however, the emergent behavior is compelling when combined to form the whole network. Reliable and immutable data storage is possible on a public, permissionless, decentralized network protocol.

In addition to data storage, arbitrary size blocks make a secure high throughput cryptocurrency possible without resorting to complicated consensus mechanisms such as dPoS or dBFT.

Arweave is tightly woven into the fabric of the internet through its REST API, and several revenue-generating businesses are being built using the Arweave mainnet. Bridges between Arweave and other popular cryptocurrencies, secure computation, and smart contract protocols will enable a low-cost and permanent data store to be easily integrated into the technology stack of decentralized applications. A fully globalized world of information and financial exchange requires permanent records, and Arweave provided the basis for those endless recordings through cryptography and distributed systems.