Arweavers,

Today we have some big news to share. Over the past six months, world-leading venture firms Union Square Ventures, Multicoin Capital, and a16z crypto have joined the growing community of long-term Arweave token holders. These truly world-leading funds have an enormous amount of experience and skills in helping projects like Arweave grow and flourish, having backed Coinbase, Facebook, Twitter and many others in their early stages. We are enormously excited to have them on board.

These new long-term partners join us on a mission to build the world’s first truly permanent information storage system. Through the Arweave protocol, we envisage a future where humanity’s valuable history, knowledge, and applications can never be lost. On top of the Arweave protocol (live for 17 months already) lives the permaweb, exposing all of the network’s data to web browsers. Imagine the Library of Alexandria, a vast catalogue of human knowledge and experience, which is now impervious to fire, flood, and other disasters. This is the permaweb.

We have decided to work directly with these new long-term partners because of their extraordinary experience and capabilities in helping projects like ours fulfil their mission even faster. For example, we’re proud to welcome Katie Haun of a16z crypto, who brings an enormous wealth of regulatory experience, as we navigate the evolving legal environment. We’re also happy to welcome Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures to the Arweave family, who brings his deep understanding about the development of our future societies. Finally, we’re excited to work with Kyle Samani from Multicoin Capital, who has an unmatched long-term view of the emerging web3 infrastructure and the surrounding industry. When we set out to build the permaweb two and a half years ago, we knew that we would need to assemble a team of the most knowledgeable and experienced people in the world to make our vision a reality. Today, we are proud to say that the Arweave community includes many of these experts, bringing us ever-closer to achieving our shared long-term goal.

Our new partners join the incredible and ever-growing community of permaweb supporters, builders, and early adopters. It’s been amazing to see how the community has rallied around our shared mission over the last year, from 1kx’s Lasse Clausen and Christopher Heymann, Arrington XRP Capital, and the Techstars global network, to individual community members (thanks @tiamat, @vilenarios, @aokisok, @sergejmueller, @joshrichardson to name just a few!).

Since we officially launched the permaweb layer built on top of the base Arweave protocol back in January this year, growth in the network has been astonishing. In the last six months alone, daily transaction usage in the network has grown by a staggering quantity, and from our early internal experiments building permaweb applications, it is awesome to now see over 100 community-built applications that live eternally on the permaweb. Although our first priority has always been the development of the protocol itself and performing innovative research rather than focusing purely on marketing, thanks to our awesome and proactive developer community spreading the news far and wide, the natural reach of our technology has been growing exponentially.

Research and development on the core protocol has continued at pace this year and we are now approaching the end of the Arweave 1.x development timeline. As the network’s feature set has stabilized, we are turning our attention to the task of pushing mass adoption of the permaweb. Thanks to the knowledge, networks, and financial support of our new partners, this means more developer community growth activities, more awareness raising, and more research and development activity in the ramp-up to Arweave 2.0. Stay tuned to this blog and our newsletter (simply sign up here) for further updates in the coming months.

It has been an exciting road to get to this point, but the road to mass adoption looks to be even more thrilling. It is incredible to see how the original idea of the permaweb has flourished, spread far from our core team and taken on a life of its own, with hackers building permaweb apps that we had never even dreamt of. We are truly thankful to the thousands of Arweave backers and supporters that have joined us on this journey to mass adoption!

-arweave-sam

Build the permaweb with us by heading to Discord, following us on Medium, and joining the discussion on the permaweb itself.