Arweave is a Berlin startup that is building a decentralized internet archive that it calls its "permaweb."



This permaweb contains information from across the globe that Arweave says cannot be changed, thus bypassing censorship or disinformation.

Arweave is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and says it is helping people in China accurately report on the coronavirus crisis.

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The Berlin startup Arweave hopes to change an internet dominated by misinformation and rumors.

The startup, founded in 2017, operates on two layers to ensure that internet content is not lost or deleted.

Despite the massive growth of data online, the internet does not really have any kind of permanent archive. About 30% of internet links are broken in under two years, and 98% of links are broken within 20 years, according to Arweave.

In an attempt to fix the internet's memory issue, the company has built a "permaweb" with the goal of permanent data storage. Arweave has built a blockchain to do this. The blockchain is effectively a digital record or distributed ledger of activity and most regularly associated with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. There is no one blockchain, rather copies of the blockchain are held on hard drives globally, all of which are updated when new details are added. The thinking is to make the system robust against hackers or censors.

Developers can build applications on top of Arweave's software.

For example, apps built on top of Arweave are capturing information within China before it is censored by the government, with the startup supporting some 200 applications, including WeiBlocked, a company that trawls Weibo — China's equivalent of Twitter — for information that might later be censored.

Arweave provides tools for developers, but regular users can also pay to access storage. Users effectively pay for the unused space on the hard drives of people who are paid to keep files secure.

"We are attempting to address the fragility of the information space," Arweave's cofounder and CEO Sam Williams told Business Insider in an interview. The company came through Techstars' Berlin incubator, though Williams most recently was studying for a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Kent in the UK.

"We help people in China speak about the reality on the ground, i.e., coronavirus, without their voice being censored by the government," Williams added.

He told Business Insider that the idea for Arweave came after he read George Orwell's "1984" and studied authoritarian governments such as those in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Recently, the Chinese government appeared to remove or hide information about Dr. Li Wenliang, who was an early whistleblower on the coronavirus in Wuhan. He died from COVID-19, but information that he promoted is still visible to users on Arweave's permaweb, away from the reach of Chinese censorship. Users can see said information on FeedWeave, a decentralized social-media site that operates on top of the platform.

Funding the future

The startup has received backing from some major names in venture capital, including Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures — but in an unconventional manner. Unlike regular fundraising, in which founders exchange equity in their business in return for capital, Arweave has raised $22 million from investors by selling tokens in its blockchain. The idea is that the value of those tokens will increase in the future as demand for Arweave's services increases. There are also only 66 million of the tokens.

The company also dispenses grants to fund startups and projects that will grow permaweb usage alongside the recently announced Arweave Boost, which provides $50,000 worth of storage to startups trying to build on the permaweb.

"We back companies which are helping to ensure the future of the permaweb," Williams added. "Our work is very important for stopping fake news and disinformation, so companies that help us build on that are starting to come through the pipeline."

Arweave users pay for storage on the permaweb for time spans as long as a century, and users in more than 50 countries support the platform through storage nodes worldwide.