Arweave - Affordable Decentralized Storage

Since its inception, blockchain has been perceived as a revolutionary technology, sparking massive commercial interest worldwide including from the likes of financial markets, cloud storage, IOT and many other applications. Blockchains and the underlying concepts of distributed computing and storage facilitate the idea of decentralization. True decentralization is secure and censorship-resistant. Most of the new age blockchain computer networks have been entirely focussed on improving the "computing" side of things i.e improving transaction speeds & throughput and there is clearly not much impetus given to the "storage" side. But no decentralized system can be considered ideal if the storage is expensive, thus affecting mainstream adoption. Needless to say, there is a great need to develop decentralized technologies and protocols that will enable permanent and low-cost storage of data. Luckily, we have a new kid on the block called Arweave that aims to create a decentralized network in which data storage is affordable.

"Arweave is a new data storage blockchain protocol on a novel proof of access consensus mechanism, creating truly permanent data storage for the first time."

Arweave's efforts to bring affordable storage is based on a novel structure called the Blockweave which works on top of a highly efficient Proof of Access consensus algorithm. Unlike its counterparts, Arweave does not require every participating node to store every block. On the contrary, the network proposes to have a block hash list that consist of the hashes of all previous blocks that will allow for the efficient verification of old as well as new blocks.

Further, the network would maintain a wallet list consisting of all active wallets that will allow transactions to be verified without possessing the block in which the last transaction was used. Another key component of Arweave's architecture is a reputation system known as Wildfire. This self-organizing network topology system incentivises miners to store and share data as quickly as possible with other miners in the network, thus contributing towards a positive reputation. Arweave also proposes a concept called Blockshadows that will make sure that information required to process large blocks can be distributed across the network in just a few kilobytes

The combined result of all the above is a network that has a TPS of around 5000, and store data at a fraction of the cost of existing storage platforms such as Filecoin, Siacoin, and Storj. The use cases will include Decentralised data storage, data sharing, data Identity/Protection and data collaboration. Through their REST API, Arweave will enable developers to build apps wherein the Arweave wallet will be used for both reading and writing of data.

The Arweave network will be powered by Arweave tokens (AR). The AR tokens were available for purchase through a token sale that generated enormous interest and hence were sold out quickly.

For the mainstream adoption of blockchains, we need to have technologies and protocols that provide low-cost on-chain storage. Arweave's approach to establishing a low cost, democratic and reputation based storage solution deserves a lot of praise both from a technical as well as ethical point of view and contributes significantly to its ultimate goal of mainstream adoption of blockchains.