Yesterday we showcased some of the awesome things that the Ethereum community built with Arweave during the recent ETHParis hackathon. Today, we are excited to show you some of the apps that the core Arweave team also built on the permaweb during a recent internal hackathon. As we explained in our introductory blog to this series, the purpose of our hackathon was not so much to build working products, but to stretch and test the bounds of the permaweb app development toolkit that we released a couple of months ago. As it turned out, all of the apps and integrations that we list below are fully functional, and give a good feel for the kinds of decentralised web apps that people can easily build with the Arweave. Without further ado…

Weavemail

Weavemail is simple: it’s a decentralised and permanent email replacement. It is a fully decentralised mechanism for sending and receiving mail using the Arweave’s permaweb as its host. As we will outline in our upcoming blog post about ‘consumer integrity’ and permaweb apps, one of the most exciting facets of this system is that now that it is launched, you will always be able to return to it in its current form. This means that we (the developers) cannot:

- Remove your access to it

- Change it to send your private messages to us — only you can see them

- Change it to add intrusive adverts

For the critical web infrastructure that we use in our daily lives, these guarantees are extremely valuable. By contrast, when you give your Gmail address to people, your access to that mail, and under what conditions (is your data private? Are there many adverts?) is totally at Google’s discretion.

Weavemail is also extremely simple — built of 186 lines of JS, and 126 lines of HTML and CSS. We are pretty excited that you can build such complex decentralised apps in so few lines on the permaweb, but do be aware that you should not currently use weavemail for serious purposes. If you are interested in building weavemail out into a production-ready product, we would love to hear from you! We would be very excited to setup a generous bounty to see this built. Contact at the weavemail address below!

@arweave-sam’s weavemail address is: vLRHFqCw1uHu75xqB4fCDW-QxpkpJxBtFD9g4QYUbfw

We’re offering 10 AR to the first 100 people to send their first Weavemail. Click the link here to get started.

Chronolock

Ever had the need to prove to someone that a document existed at a certain point in time? Perhaps you have used this kind of functionality at an old school notary. Chronolock is a simple, and exceptionally cheap, way of proving that a piece of data existed at a certain point in time — ‘locking’ it chronologically into the blockweave.

Simply drop your file onto the web page, then your low-balance Arweave keyfile (see note on permaweb app security models below!). After your transaction has been mined into a block, a record of the existence of this file will be permanently available from the blockweave, buried under vast quantities of computational work. Then, any time that you want to prove that this file existed at an earlier point, simply drop the file onto the page again and the details of when it was first mined will be recalled.

Check out Chronolock here: https://arweave.net/xqx3Ua8VBQLgdKqlI4gtZdVoXxLLF8csKn5in-joJqo

Zapier Integration

Zapier <> Arweave

Zapier invite link: https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/9821/9d6e8c37b909a1196ab98aedab967b5d/

Competition prize: 1000 AR (see terms below)

Zapier is a simple, no-programming web tool that allows you to join together events and actions between APIs. The Arweave integration with Zapier allows users to chain together actions on other services (for example, a new tweet on Twitter) with Arweave’s permanent archiving, as well as triggering other events on different services in response to new Arweave transactions.

Because of Zapier’s advanced integrations with thousands of other APIs, you can now build an almost endless variety of different Arweave apps with zero programming required. For example, we now have a ‘whale watch’ bot that allows us to track when large amounts of AR are moving through the system, as well as an automated archiver of @realDonaldTrump’s tweet. These are just a couple of the different integrations you can build with Arweave+Zapier, and to help you start building awesome apps on the permaweb, we are offering a prize of 1000 AR to the best Zapier+Arweave integration!

Competition rules:

Submissions (either as a short video showing what it does, or a brief text guide with some screenshots) should be made by Friday 19th April 2019

Submissions should be sent to team@arweave.org

Multiple submissions per person are allowed

Tomorrow we will be publishing another article taking you through the process of building your first Zapier+Arweave apps, so watch out for that!

Note on permaweb app security models

The current permaweb app security model is to generate a new, low balance wallet for each application that you use. Remember to only store as many tokens in these wallets as you feel comfortable trusting the application with, as they will have access to the full amount of funds in the wallet. We are working on a bridge that allows the developer to call out to the gateway or the Arweave web extension to sign transactions there, delegating trust to these components of the ecosystem rather than the app itself.

Stay tuned to this blog for further discussion of how we see this playing out over the long-term, and how you can get involved! For now, imagine that these permaweb apps are like early web ecommerce sites — don’t give them your credit card details if you don’t trust them! (And if you do trust them, only use a wallet that has a balance you are comfortable sharing with the app owner).

Remember to check back tomorrow for guides and videos on how to build your first Arweave+Zapier apps!