Arweave announces further funding from Andreessen Horowitz, USV, and Coinbase Ventures

We are excited to announce that we have raised $8.3 million in additional funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, and new funding from Coinbase Ventures. We are thrilled to re-invest these funds directly into Arweave’s community of buidlers, starting with Arweave Boost and Arweave Grants.

Arweave Boost is a dedicated offering for any project, startup, or company looking to boost their value-add with the help of reliable, truly permanent data storage. With Arweave Grants, we are re-investing our new funding right back into your projects; just tell us your amazing ideas for permaweb projects, and we will fund them! Not sure what to build?! Check out USV’s exciting list of what they would like to see built on Arweave.

New on the permaweb

Corona Archives

With a keen interest in epidemiology, developer Sam Rahimi set out on a mission to capture the media surrounding the coronavirus and store it on the permaweb. Concerned about the attempts certain countries made to block people from accessing information about the virus online, Sam created the ‘Corona Archives’ — a simple dashboard that lets you view the daily statistics for each region, going back to mid-January, when the epidemic began. Follow the project here: https://samrahimi.github.io

Weibo Archive

When we discovered Sam Rahimi’s Corona Archives, we decided to team up and work together on another project: Weibo Archive. The Weibo Archive preserves potentially vulnerable content from the Chinese social network Weibo, which has recently been in the news for hiring thousands of new content censors — helping to suppress information about the spread of the coronavirus, and clamping down on trends such as #IWantFreeSpeech on their platform. Additionally, a tool is currently in development that helps people archive, record, and automatically discover which content is being censored or deleted, and easily access it on the permaweb. Follow the project here: https://weibo-uncensored.github.io/

Community initiatives

Active hackathons:

Record the Forks Permafeed

Prize: 100 DAI

This hackathon is to build and run a bot that will archive block hashes and block headers from other blockchains on the Permaweb, providing a permanent history of blocks and fork events. After the first month, you can continue to earn a prize for each consecutive month until the bounty ends. Head over to the GitHub issue to find out more.

Stay tuned for more upcoming hackathons on our GitHub portal.

ARCA DAO

We caught up with members of the ARCA DAO to find out what they’ve been up to since the launch of our very first community-governed DAO. Their first few weeks were mostly organisational: assigning roles and coordinating tasks.

So far, the DAO members have released the following:

Public sign up form

Public grant application (2500 DAI has been granted to one applicant)

ARX: a platform that wraps AR on Ethereum & allows you to trade on decentralised exchanges

ARCA community gateway (voting is currently underway)

PermaSnap: a photo-sharing application that has been granted funding of 2055 DAI

The ARCA DAO is currently accepting new members, and are looking for people who are skilled in the fields of marketing and design. To participate in the DAO, head over to the arca-dao Discord channel.

Arweave in the wild

Arweave’s Permaweb stops coronavirus censorship, raises $8M:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/coronavirus-censorship-arweave/

Blockchain startup Arweave secures $8.3M from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures:

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/57928/blockchain-startup-arweave-secures-8-3m-from-andreessen-horowitz-union-square-ventures-and-coinbase-ventures

Arweave’s censorship-resistance mentioned in VICE news: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kz7ad/china-just-outlawed-clickbait-and-sensationalist-headlines

Permanent data storage startup Arweave raises $8.3 million as China censors coronavirus critics:

https://www.axios.com/arweave-funding-permanent-data-storage-coronavirus-152c0043-c31e-4b86-b541-019ccee7b00e.html

Events

Future of Blockchain #2

November 1st — March 15th

Future of Blockchain began in November last year, and has since travelled to universities in Cambridge, Oxford, London, and Berlin, on a mission to educate and discover new talent in the developer and entrepreneurial space. Many teams have joined the hackathon and the deadline has now been extended to March 15th 2020. We have already seen several great teams using Arweave for their projects, and we can’t wait to see the final submissions. There’s still time to register and submit your build, so head over to the FoB blog for more details.