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Arweave aims to deliver a global, permanent hard drive on a new kind of blockchain. If successful it may enable high throughput, decentralized, immutable, and most importantly, low cost data storage. The team consists of current PhD computer science candidates out of the University of Kent who joined the TechStars Berlin 2018 accelerator program under the name Archain (since renamed to avoid confusion with other projects such as Rchain and Achain). When you read down to the Team and Advisors section you'll see both the University of Kent and TechStars fingerprints all over this project. TechStars is an incubator to look out for, they produced another hyped cryptocurrency project: Loom Network (TechStars NY). The team publishes on Medium often so it is easy to follow along the history of the project from their pre-TechStars to post-TechStars days. There is a clear graduation from a university-based project to a "cryptocurrency" project flushed with advisors and a marketing machine behind it as you read through their posts. That clear growth to me indicates a maturing team and the ideas behind underlying this project.
File storage: the old fashioned way
Arweave's project has been tested over the last several months and further developed within the TechStars accelerator. In fact, their mainnet will launch soon on June 8th. I discussed the problems of decentralized storage in my Phantasma ICO Review last week but let's go over the pain points again. Exponential amounts of data is created year after year. To keep up with the petabytes of data the questions of where and how to handle it becomes important. Over the past few years, data storage has undergone a transformation from on-premise storage to cloud storage solutions. Vendors such as Amazon and Google offer storage products but these solutions are controlled by them and only them. While considered secure, customers rely that their data on the security offered by Amazon and Google. Customers move to these solutions because they might be cheaper than building a data center and setting up data warehouses themselves. Sometimes buying solutions is better than building it yourself.But this existing system leaves much to be desired. Some may argue that the data is less secure because of the fact that a centralized company has the data. These central players become a choke point and a target for hackers. Some will also argue that centralized storage is expensive not in terms of price but in terms of the relinquished autonomy, future switching costs, and the potential change in access to data. With these problems in mind, decentralized storage may very well be the answer. Projects such as FileCoin, SiaCoin, Sharder, and now Arweave are trying to take on the decentralized storage problem.
Blockweave is the name of the method/feature enabling nodes to join the network immediately. In contract to other blockchains, Arweave will give the option to nodes to either store the entire blockchain or a much smaller carrying load. Rather than a newly joined node having to sync the entire blockchain, it will only have to download the latest block. Inside the current block will be two new key innovations:
Proof of Access (Arweave's Consensus Algorithm)
Arweave features a hybrid consensus mechanism. Proof-of-Work (PoW) combined with Proof-of-Access (PoA) allows miners to verify transactions and blocks quickly. You may already be familiar with PoW so let's dive into PoA and how it works. Miners typically store the latest block and all prior blocks, best viewed as a chain (hence the blockchain). In Arweave, miners still store the latest block but only needs to store any one of the previous blocks. This lightens the data load for miners. On other blockchains storage becomes an issue as new blocks may be sent to miners who have run out of storage. Arweave solves this problem. The previous block is randomly selected and is known as a 'recall block'. It is incorporated into the next block alongside the latest transactions. As in PoW, when a miner finds a correct hash it will broadcast the latest block to the rest of the network to verify.
Wildfire (Arweave's Incentive Design)
In order to create a network of nodes to store data and provide access to it, Arweave has created its incentive system known as Wildfire. I love Game of Thrones references so let's include a photo of Wildfire on that series.
Wildfire is ultimately a ranking system to aid in fast block creation and peer distribution. Think of this as uploading and downloading data. Nodes that provide great service in providing access to data (for free mind you) and that accept data from others receive a higher rank. Low ranking nodes will be removed from the network. Ultimately this leads to a meritocratic and honest system with a network topology optimized for fast and free data storage and retrieval.
Blockshadows (data communication and overhead)
As mentioned in the PoA system, other blockchains share the entire block and its underlying data to all nodes on the network. Bitcoin's block size today is 1 MB and Bitcoin Cash just upped their block size to 32 MB. Larger block sizes slow down the network's transmission rates but increases the number of transactions per block. This push and pull comes at the cost of potentially slowing down the time it takes to reach consensus. Arweave has a very clever set of names for its features, and so Blockshadows is introduced as a method to partially strip down the block's information but still reach validation. Blockshadows will decouples transactions from the block by only sending a hash of the wallet list and a hash of the block hash list (discussed above in the Blockweave section). I wrote a small function quickly going over what a hashing function down below. Ultimately, rather than communicating enormous amounts of data around to each and every node, only a fraction is sent across the network. Arweave's theoretical limit is 5,000 TPS over a 100 MBPS. Can't tell you how refreshing it is not to hear "million TPS" from a project. I find this value much more honest.
Example:
Just 9 days later, Arweave announced another partnership with a fellow TechStars member: Shelf.Network, an innovative decentralized auction house network. Arweave will store the large amounts of auction listing data. Arweave's architecture is said to be able to handle large data sizes than other onchain storage options. The alternative is to store the data on a centralized database. That's simply no fun and completely antithetical to the decentralization movement.
Sources
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