Arweave’s total number of transactions has exceeded 1 billion. How will it move towards large-scale applications in the future?

Arweave has surpassed 1 billion transactions. What are its plans for future large-scale applications?

Commemoration of the Present

In the semi-annual report of Arweave 2023 at the beginning of this month, SCP Ventures captured 9.4 billion transaction data and expected to break through 1 billion in August. Unexpectedly, under the surge in transaction volume, the cumulative number of transactions on the Arweave network has officially exceeded 1 billion.

This is the second milestone after the Arweave network exceeded 100 PB in scale. As the founder Sam said, this is a historic achievement for Arweave since its inception 6 years ago and the launch of the mainnet 5 years ago!

Among the factors that contributed to this achievement, the ANS-104 standard defined the Bundle standard, enabling the network to handle different types of data such as transactions, transfers, and data uploads in a more flexible and powerful way. Without the Bundle standard, the entire network might only have half of the current transaction volume. With half the effort, Arweave has completed its historical mission while saving users 50% of the cost.

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Bundlr and Arseeding are among the leaders in this field. Bundlr has reached a new peak of 5.9 million transactions in a single day, while Arseeding will continue to collaborate with tools such as KNN3, Adot, and 4everland to provide better developer services.

Arweave’s goal is to provide a reliable, secure, and permanent storage solution that allows users to store important data on the network and ensure that it is never lost or tampered with.

Through Arweave, users can permanently store various types of data on the network, such as documents, audio, video, images, etc. Compared to traditional cloud storage solutions, Arweave provides higher reliability and security because the data is stored in a distributed blockchain network and cannot be tampered with or deleted.

This fundamentally differs from existing storage projects, whether they are traditional centralized cloud storage providers or competitors in the Web3 field. Any file uploaded to Arweave can be securely stored for at least 200 years.

But this is only the functionality that people usually remember about Arweave. The next step will be a shift from “cold storage” to “hot computation,” where data will gain more vitality and economic value.

Before that, let’s look back at the origins of Arweave:

Memories Fade Away

Arweave’s usage was once long-term bleak, and the value of permanent storage was not widely accepted and recognized by the market. The development of Arweave can be divided into three stages:

• Before August 2021, Arweave was just one of the decentralized storage projects, although it received a large amount of financing, the overall ecosystem and project did not really grow;
• From August 2021 to August 2022, the first small peak in usage occurred, and during this stage, Bundlr started to promote network usage. The earliest code submission record can be traced back to July 4, 2021;
• From August 2022 to the present, the Arweave network has started to experience explosive growth, and the most noteworthy aspect is that this was achieved against the backdrop of a bear market. Among them, the 2.6 version upgrade that took effect in March 2023 allowed mechanical hard drives to participate in mining, reducing the entry barrier to the network.

The focus of Arweave 2.6 is on two aspects: reducing the energy consumption of Arweave’s data storage to improve the efficiency of the storage market, and incentivizing miners to store more data, especially rare data backups and data types with heavy space requirements such as audio and video.

Specifically, it will mainly include the following four measures:

• By encouraging miners to use cheaper hard drives to store data instead of further improving transmission speed, the average cost of Arweave storage is reduced;
• By incentivizing miners to back up more complete copies of Arweave mainnet data, faster indexing of information is established, achieving a more “distributed” data backup network;
• Allowing more mining power to be devoted to truly useful data types to reduce energy waste in the network and avoid excessive junk information in exchange for AR tokens;
• Allowing the estimation of storage costs in the Arweave network to be based on dynamic pricing, guiding miners to focus on storing higher-value data types and improving network fault tolerance.

These efforts have proven to be worthwhile, and the Arweave network has also been chosen by more projects as their data storage solution. The most typical example is the Lens Protocol, which migrated its data to the Arweave network.

In addition, Arweave’s ecosystem infrastructure is no longer barren. everVision has built the universal payment protocol everLianGuaiy, as well as the 0 Gas Fee DEX Permaswap based on the SCP paradigm. It achieves transaction speeds consistent with traditional centralized exchanges through off-chain computing and on-chain settlement. The approach is highly similar to that of UniswapX.

The next goal of Arweave can only be to serve the next billion users, break away from the internal cycle, and move towards a more mainstream market space.

Looking to the Future

Arweave has entered the era of large-scale application, and the next step of blockchain will not be limited to the field of pure financial transactions. More extensive scenarios require more complex infrastructure to support them.

As mentioned earlier, simple cold storage needs to be transformed, and more complex hot computing will become the main theme. Whether it is Permaweb, general database DB3, or the communication end-to-end encryption layer Mind Network, they are all new ways of network service applications.

It is also under the promotion of a rich ecosystem of dApps that the Arweave network has gradually grown into a towering tree, and the next step will focus on further reducing the barriers for user participation:

1. Lower barriers to participation: The usage of Arweave will continue to be simplified. Users do not need to install the Arweave mainnet, they only need to purchase a certain amount of AR tokens on everLianGuaiy to participate in transactions, storage, and development. Compared to the traditional internet, Arweave will remove participation barriers and attract more ordinary users and traditional users to participate;
2. Updated reward mechanism: Arweave has innovated the mining mechanism to incentivize user participation in transactions. Users can now use $U to earn AR tokens as rewards for storing and transmitting data, whether it is direct interaction with the Arweave network or using lightweight nodes such as Arseeding, all rewards will be directly returned to end users;
3. Stimulate community activity: Arweave has multiple active communities, such as PermaDAO, which is hosting the Arweave Summer Asian Hackathon to encourage developers to participate in and use Arweave. In addition, Community Labs is actively developing low-barrier wallet toolkits and sharing them with the community;
4. Development of application ecosystem: Arweave’s application ecosystem is also constantly growing and expanding, covering multiple fields and industries. Taking Mind Network as an example, it has already introduced zero-trust mechanisms into Arweave, decoupling data storage and computation, and fully leveraging the excellent characteristics of Arweave’s cold storage.

Next is to promote the continuous prosperity of the creator economy, truly liberating individuals from the profit deprivation and censorship of traditional centralized institutions, and returning freedom of will to everyone. For example, UDL (Unified Data Protocol) will provide an effective on-chain standard for Web3 content creators in terms of content distribution, incentive setting, and permission management, making creators the true protagonists of content creation and dispersing the platform advantages of centralized institutions to each individual;

Of course, the development of Arweave is far from perfect. However, as an “Old School” project that has survived two bull and bear cycles, Arweave still maintains sufficient innovation and has not fallen into silence. We firmly believe that the Arweave network will become a fundamental component of the entire future world, shining on human civilization like the Library of Alexandria.

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