My TL;DR: A decentralized file storage solution, with a novel consensus mechanism that allows for fast transactions and incentivizes long term data storage.

Decentralized data storage is one of the best blockchain use-cases out there. We have IPFS (inter-Planetary File System) since 2014 and older projects such as SiaCOin, FileCoin, Storj, Maid and others exist. Still, decentralized storage has yet to see major adoption (do you have something stored that way?) and a dominant protocol is yet to emerge. New projects claim to bring all sorts of improvements, so we have ViewChain, Lightstreams, Phantasma (to some extent) and others claiming to bring improvements.

Arweave (rebranded from Archain a couple of months ago) throws its hat in the ring, claiming high throughput, persistency of data, and an incentive mechanism for participants in the network to store and share as much as possible. It does so via a few interesting pieces of technology:

Blockweave – a blockchain-ish distributed network of nodes, on top of which dApps can be built in any language. Nodes can jump on the network right away, only requiring a hash of the entire ledger, instead of all of it, increasing onboarding and transaction speed

Proof of Access consensus mechanism – interesting model requiring a node to have a “recall” block (some random earlier block in the chain) in order to mint the new block. Nodes storing the recall block get rewarded when a new block is minted. This incentivizes nodes to store as many blocks as possible individually, instead of “pooling” storage space. Simply put, multiple nodes will not share a single storage instance, but rather be encouraged to host as much as they can on their own.

Wildfire – a self-sustaining network topology, where nodes map their connections to other nodes and serve the fastest ones first. This incentivizes nodes to be online all the time and have sufficient bandwidth and storage, to climb through the topology ranks and therefore mine more efficiently

Blockshadows – instead of transmitting full blocks of transactions and wallet lists to all other nodes in the network, Blockweave nodes only send out hashes, and the other nodes use those hashes to reconstruct the block, based on information they already have stored. This should allow for faster propagation of blocks and therefore higher throughput, while maintaining consensus along the distributed network

What I like:

Scalable on-chain storage, 5,000 TPS

dApps can already be created in any programming language thanks to their own REST APIs

Interesting consensus model that only requires blockhashes and not the entire history, to mint new blocks, which translates into faster transactions

Testnet since 7 months, main-net live in 1 month

What I dislike:

CEO & CTO very inexperienced, this is their 2nd startup, previously they were uni assistants

The rest of the team is weak as well, no outstanding advisors, except maybe the Bitbucket founder.

Artificial TG hype due to airdrop / referral, no meaningful partnerships

They go live in 1 month, but are yet to release token metrics, white paper or a roadmap, speaking negatively of the team’s ability to deliver

Exchange listing could take a while, as they will issue a native token

Overall, I am on the fence about this project. It has good tech, a lot of hype and a sexy $8.7mn cap. I, however, am not convinced by the inexperienced team and lack of a roadmap. Still, I appreciate that they focus more on building than selling, they bring interesting concepts to the table and boldly take on a large number of competitors that are yet to convince. I will invest small.

Partners

The Team



https://www.arweave.org/

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Also published on Medium.