Blockchain storage project Arweave received $5 million in financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz

On November 6th, Arweave, a blockchain startup focused on online data storage, announced that it has received $5 million in financing from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Other well-known participating institutions include Union Square Ventures and Multicoin. Capital.

It is reported that the startup was founded in 2017 by Sam Williams, which promises to permanently host data, web applications and pages on its so-called "permaweb".

Regarding this financing, Williams commented:

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“These new partners will work with us to implement the world’s first truly permanent information storage system. Through the Arweave agreement, we envision a future in which the precious history, knowledge and applications of humanity will never be lost.”

Williams further explained the meaning of permaweb:

“Imagine the Alexander Library, a huge catalog of human knowledge and experience that is now immune to fires, floods and other disasters. This is permaweb.”

According to the plan, the financing will help the company further develop its business, and previously, Arweave has received support from institutions such as Arrington XRP Capital and Techstars.

Blockweave data structure and Blockshadow data distribution method

According to the instructions provided by the Arweave Yellow Book , the protocol uses a new data structure blockweave similar to the blockchain.

In this data structure, each new block is connected to two previous blocks: the previous block in the "chain" (as with the traditional blockchain protocol), and a block in the previous history of the blockchain ("Call block"). Therefore, the Arweave data structure is not a chain structure in a strict sense, but a slightly more complex structure, which we call blockweave.

In addition, the Arweave protocol uses an innovative approach to data distribution.

In a traditional blockchain network, when a new block is mined, the entire block is distributed to each node in the network, which significantly limits the amount of data that can be included in the block, because all The data needs to be spread on the network during the consensus period. If too much data is transmitted during the block acceptance, the time required to reach consensus will become too long. The probability of bifurcation in the blockchain network during the consensus period is as follows:

Subsequently, since the distribution time of the block is linear with the size of the block, the size of the block is also linear with the possibility of bifurcation. Since the arweave protocol stores data in the block itself, the normal blockchain trade-off between P(fork) and Bmax_size is unacceptable.

Therefore, the arweave protocol uses a new data distribution method: Blockshadow, which is a technical solution based on graphene and compact block (BIP-152).

So far, about 100 applications have been built on the arweave platform, including social forums, media, notes, etc. The company said in a press release that in October alone, more than 45,000 objects were uploaded to the permaweb. So far, users have submitted about 160,000 transactions to the network.

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