Summary
Arweave aims to become an indispensable storage layer that can provide speed and scalability to other systems. Arweave is defined as data storage blockchain protocol that provides high-throughput, low-cost, permanent on-chain data storage solutions based on proof of access consensus mechanism.
Website: https://arweave.org/
Token symbol: AR
Token type: ERC20
Token price: 1 AR= $0.75
Lightpaper: https://arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf
Whitelist: https://arweave.org/onboard.html
Hard cap: $8,700,000 USD
Total possible tokens: 66,000,000
Token distribution:
Community reserved: 48.5%
Pre-sale and public sale: 7th June 2018
Token distribution
48.5% Crowdsale
26.5% Reserve
19.1% Ecosystem
13% Team
2.9% Advisors
Token distribution timeline
Expected token distribution is on June 8, after Mainnet launch
Product stage
Released Alpha testnet on November and currently working on their Mainnet to be released in June 2018.
Team
Overall, the team looks fairly inexperienced but with a good educational achievement. Most of them have little experience in the industry and only few developers. It's unsure whether they are suitable to run a company, aiming to disrupt the competitive space of data storage.
Sam Williams (Co-Founder & CEO) Sam is a Computer Science PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham. The focus of his research is decentralized system design. With a background in academia, Arweave is Sam’s first foray into the startup world
William Jones (Co-Founder & CTO) William is also a Computer Science PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on the development of cognitive systems and neural networks.
India Raybould (CCO) India has academic and work experience in psychology. She served as a psychology advisor before joining Arweave as Chief Coordinating Officer.
Kyle Beckles (Senior developer) Kyle began his career in 2015 as a developer with Bright Future Software. He has held developer positions with UKFast and boohoo,com. Kyle holds a BSc in Software Engineering from the University of Nottingham.
Anthony Ryan is an adviser to Arweave. Anthony serves as Head of Growth at Quantstamp and has a strong background in entrepreneurship.
Opportunities
Arweave has an existing MVP, they have released their alpha testnet on November 2017 and planning to launch mainnet in June
The team also has established the REST API for developers
Storage protocols have a favourable track record when it comes to delivering returns
Arweave made partnership with Charité, Europe’s largest university clinic. Charité and Arweave are cooperating to create the Journal of Raw Data, an online open-access biomedical data journal that is peer reviewed. Arweave will provide a storage solution so that data sets from biomedical research submitted to the journal will be publically available, inalterable and immutable.This shows the purpose of the project even outside decentralized networks
Concerns
Existing strong competitors like Storj and MaidSafe
Adaptation of the community. Would there be enough users to use the device?
Price and product might be an issue in the future. Is it a better storage than alternatives?
The team has no track of long term capabilities, thus, people are watching out on their future steps on development
No Roadmap
Conclusion
In conclusion, the project is great. Creating a novel storage solution to the table with a mainnet launch around the corner. This could be great once they execute it right and market it properly. The team is quite new to the start-up world but has shown remarkable step towards success.
Arweave is a serious contender among storage protocols.