Arweave - Sleeping AI Elephant that never forgets 🐘

May 15, 2024

If Bitcoin has solidified its status as the digital gold standard, Arweave aspires to be the information gold standard - becoming the immutable repository for the world's most valuable information

Arweave in a Nutshell

The Arweave network is like Bitcoin, but for data: It allows anyone to store their data permanently on Arweave with a one-time fee. This is possible through its Proof of Access (PoA) consensus model and endowment system - More details here

Arweave has transcended way beyond its initial role as a data storage solution and is now positioning itself as an L1 infrastructure that enables decentralized computing applications with the recent introduction of the AO Computer and aims to safeguard intellectual property (IP) rights and provenance through EX: Universal Data License (UDL). Arweave is solidifying its position as a new permaweb.

To date, Arweave has stored 165.21+ Terrabytes of data and processed 5B transactions (TXS). To put things into perspective, its on-chain data is 10x bigger than the history of Ethereum

Data stored on Arweave is censorship-resistant and immutable, forever but it comes at a premium cost

The cost of storing data on Arweave is significantly higher than centralized alternatives like Amazon S3 / Google Cloud with an approximate cost of $18 per GB of data.

Given the relatively high cost, Arweave is best suited for storing high-value data that demands long-term preservation, authenticity, and resistance to censorship or tampering

Top Use Cases includes:

L1 Infrastructure Backups: Major L1 Infrastructure such as Solana, Avalanche, NEAR, Polkadot, Ethereum utilize Arweave as a secure backup solution for their on-chain data and historical records
Decentralized Social dapps - Farcaster, Lens Protocol, Cyberconnect utilize Arweave as the base layer for all decentralized social data
Oracle - Redstone Oracle utilizes Arweave as a big data lake to publish data points
NFT: Storage solution for NFT metadata, ensuring integrity and provenance of digital art and collectibles

Factors facing the world that would drive sustained demand for permanence

While we see exponential demand and traction for Arweave in the web3 space, I expect the demand for permanent and decentralized storage solutions to persist and grow beyond the blockchain ecosystem due to several critical factors facing the world today:

1. Preservation of human history & Culture digitally

Critical historical data has often been expunged or suppressed, leading to a muddy understanding of the past. This can impede our ability to navigate the future effectively, particularly when insight into the past is crucial for anticipating what lies ahead
Most of the records on the internet before 2008 had completely been wiped out. Most of those website links are dead links. (Average lifespan of a website = 2 years old before getting wiped off the server)

2. IP Rights: Weak Assurance around who created what content and when?

The existing legal framework for intellectual property (IP) rights is struggling to keep up with the rapid advancements in generative AI technologies. There are significant challenges in attributing the origin and provenance of AI-generated content, leading to a crisis of trust and potential infringement of IP rights

Emergence of AO Computer - The Hyper Parallel Computer

On Feb 13, 2024, Arweave announced the launch of Actor-Oriented Machine (AO), a hyper-parallel computer. AO Computer is a unified computing environment that enables parallel processes to operate autonomously while coordinating through an open message-passing layer. This innovative architecture allows multiple computations to run simultaneously and independently. This is best explained in this article here

With AO Computer, Arweave can now store data at any arbitrary scale. On-chain data that scales to any size. Watch Product Demo

https://x.com/aoComputerClub/status/1773764997505744983

How does AO Computer compare to other Leading L1 infrastructure?

Infinite horizontal scaling VS queue system as seen in both Bitcoin and Solana: Offers a new way to scale that's different from typical blockchains. It doesn't depend on users fighting for limited space but uses parallel computing to prevent the usual network slowdowns
High Transaction Throughput: Becomes the first scalable L1 protocol with high TPS (Up to 600TPS)
Verifiability: Processes can both load data from and write data to Arweave

Perfect Scaling solution for automation via AI/ML

The combination of infinite horizontal scaling, high throughput, and data verifiability makes AO Computer well-suited for autonomous AI agent applications. We can already see autonomous bots employed on testnet

Recently, it was announced that there will be a new organization Autonomous Finance on X that their goal is to build AO's core financial infrastructure that combines the trustless nature of DeFi with AO’s infinite scalability and data accessibility.

On 10 May 2024, just last week, the team had unveiled the first product demo that highlights an autonomous trading agent running on the AO Computer network. This agent utilizes ML models to automatically execute dollar-cost averaging (DCA) strategies, buying the TRUNK token using AO as the trading pair

While not the first of its kind, this demo illustrates AO Computer's capability to host autonomous AI agents that can operate independently on the decentralized network

The autonomous trading agent demo showcases just one example of how AO Computer's decentralized infrastructure can facilitate the development and deployment of AI applications that operate autonomously on-chain, paving the way for more innovative use cases in areas like decentralized finance, gaming, and beyond

Apart from this, there is a growing ecosystem of dApps and infrastructure solutions being built on top of the AO Computer network

It’s still very early days for AO but we can already see over the last couple of weeks, the market had already started repricing Arweave from a middleware/storage provider to a fully-fledged L1 infrastructure

The Vision

Arweave aspires to be the information gold standard, rivaling Bitcoin in its capacity to safeguard and authenticate valuable data. With the emergence of AI-driven data analysis, the reliability of information becomes paramount, positioning Arweave as formidable player in the AI sector.

Upcoming Catalyst / Short-term Growth Outlook

AO Summit (15th May)
AgentFi narrative (DeFi → AutonomousFi)
Arweave’s adoption (Major application yet to be announced)
Sam William, the founder of Arweave, hinted during an interview that a major application is starting to embrace the UDL model, as referenced at the (37:10) mark of his interview in the Proof of Coverage Podcast

Don't fade a hungry founder whose hunger for innovation persists, year after year!

Any resemblance?

What does this mean for $AR holders?

The entire token supply for AR is fully circulating and liquid. There are no vesting or sudden influx of tokens hitting the market from unlocking events
Growing speculation of airdrop to Arweave's early adopters, hinting at possibly needing to burn AR tokens to obtain AO tokens.