Arweave Price

Arweave is a data storage protocol built on blockweave technology. The new model being introduced by Arweave is an underlying network where data can be stored permanently and accessed on its permaweb.

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Read on to learn everything you need to know about the Arweave project and the AR cryptocurrency.

What Is Arweave

Arweave is a decentralized data storage network launched in 2018 and dedicated to permanent data hosting. It aims to ensure that all the data is easily available and accessible indefinitely.

Arweave is the basis for permaweb — a permanent decentralized web that hosts several community-driven applications and platforms.  The permaweb is a community-owned network that operates like the traditional web. However, the data added to the permaweb cannot be changed or deleted, even by the creator.

In Arweave's new model of permanent storage, users pay a single fee upfront and can then store their data forever. Two unique mechanisms make this possible: proof-of-access and the data storage endowment.

Arweave uses crypto-economic game theory to incentivize miners in such a way that they can ensure the permanence, reliability, and availability of the stored data.

The Arweave network is a fully decentralized network, which means that anyone can provide storage space or use the network to store data. The data is replicated and distributed across hundreds of computers worldwide, thereby preventing the data held on the network from being lost due to damage, fires, or floods.

Anyone can build on Arweave and, if they own spare hard drive space, they can earn a passive income by renting it to other users throughout the network.

AR is the currency of the Arweave network. It fuels the protocol and its activities, such as payment of transaction fees, including data storage and retrieval, app interaction, and transactions.

The number of AR tokens in circulation is limited to 66 million units. The first tranche of AR cryptocurrency was created in June 2018 when Arweave was launched. At that time, 55 million AR tokens were created.

Arweave Founders

Arweave network's co-founders are Sam Williams and William Jones, who met while studying for Ph.D. degrees at the UK's Kent University.

Sam Williams, the CEO, and co-founder of Arweave, is a serial entrepreneur with experience in software and software design. Having started coding at a young age, Williams has built distributed computer systems and networks, including an operating system called HydrOS. He has also founded software development companies Minimum Spanning Technologies and Arweave.

In his talks, Sam mentioned that he came up with the idea of scaling data storage while being in Scotland. Later he shared his views with William, and they developed technical details together.

Sam is also a technical advisor at Berlin-based blockchain-powered mineral sourcing platform Minespider, a voting member at Australian privacy-protecting solution LAG Foundation, and a mentor at the American capital market company Techstars.

William Jones was focused on graph theory and artificial neural networking. In 2018 he left the project to get his Ph.D. degree. Currently, Jones is AI and machine learning lead at open source software development company Embecosm.

The CTO of Arweave is Jesper Noehr, a man with over two decades of experience in the technology sector. He was also the founder and CEO of Bitbucket, a Git code management tool later acquired by Atlassian. Noehr was also the founder of Upvest.co, an API that ties together a fully integrated suite of investment products.

The COO of Arweave, Sebastian Campos Groth, has early-stage venture capital, business development, and project management background. Before joining Arweave, he started the first Techstars Metro Accelerator before managing the Techstars Berlin program.

In November of 2019, Arweave secured a $5 million funding round from several venture capital firms in exchange for $5 in Arweave tokens. Six months later, the Arweave team raised another $8.3 million in exchange for AR tokens. The firm stated that it would use the new funds to incentivize community adoption and growth.

While Arweave was founded with centralized leadership, it launched a decentralized autonomous organization in January 2020 comprised of core community members to develop and expand the network and its ecosystem.

Arweave ICO

Arweave was launched through Initial Coin Offering (ICO) on June 6, 2018. It ended with raising $8.7 million. At the time of the offering, the Arweave price was $0.73.

The network has a maximum supply of 66 million AR. 55 million from this amount (1.1% of genesis block supply) was made available for public sale. The remaining 11 million AR have been entered into circulation as mining rewards.

The project investors participating in the seed funding rounds were A16z crypto, Multicoin Capital, Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Coinbase Ventures.

How Does AR Work

There are four core technologies that are behind the Arweave protocol:

• Blockweave
• Succinct Random Proof of Access
• Wildfire
• Blockshadows

Blockweave is the data structure technology that allows nodes to join the Arweave network immediately, without any waiting period. It's a revised version of blockchain technology that implements a proof-of-access consensus mechanism, which is a version of proof-of-work.  Each new block in PoA is associated not only with the one before it but also with a random previous block, and both blocks are hashed to construct the new one.

In August 2019, the cybersecurity firms Trail of Bits, Kudelski Security, X41 D-Sec, and QuarksLab successfully authenticated RandomX, Arweave's mining protocol. From 2021, the project started transferring to a new mining algorithm called SPoRA, which NCC Group audited in December 2020. 

Succinct Proofs of Random Access (SPoRA) is an improvement on the PoA consensus mechanism. SPoRA increases miner incentives and further promotes competition for data retrieval. This works by reducing incentives for CPU resource pool mining. SPoRA creates more compelling incentives and gamification techniques to encourage decentralization.

Wildfire is a ranking system based on how quickly network nodes can fulfill data requests. The faster a network peer can distribute new blocks and transactions, the higher the rank. Network peers have financial incentives to fulfill data requests as quickly as possible, increasing their chances of completing further data requests. Peers that severely underperform can be blacklisted from the network entirely.

Blockshadows minimize the amount of duplicated data broadcast throughout the network to achieve consensus much faster. As a result, the throughput of the network increases.

The blockshadowing system also facilitates flexible block distribution with ultra-fast transaction speeds. In addition, the fluctuation of network fees during times of congestion is relatively low.

Permaweb

On January 29, 2019, Arweave launched Permaweb, a worldwide community-owned web. The permaweb appears to be just like the regular web. However, all content the permaweb holds is permanent, decentralized, and easily retrievable. This includes images, text, applications, etc.

Anyone can contribute to the permaweb to maintain it and receive payment for doing so.

The permaweb is a collection of linked applications and documents on top of the Arweave data storage layer. Once a user adds content or data to the permaweb, it's permanently stored and accessible from anywhere in the world, at any time. Nobody can alter the data, not even the person who submitted it. This ensures that documents remain verifiable and also enforces consumer integrity throughout the network.

SmartWeave

In June 2020, Arweave launched SmartWeave smart contracts. Here a system of lazy evaluation is used. Users interacting with a smart contract in Arweave are required to evaluate prior transactions until reaching the end of the chain of valid state transitions. The user then evaluates their own call to the contract and writes the resulting state transition to the network.

SmartWeave provides a solid base for scalable smart contract execution and a framework for an entirely new subset of smart contracts to be constructed.

Profit-Sharing Tokens and Profit-Sharing Communities

Arweave launched PSTs in June and PSCs in August.

Profit-sharing communities are a fairer structure for web startups that give founders more control and flexibility over their projects. All profit-sharing community contributors earn tokens that give them fair governance rights, instant liquidity, and access to micro-dividends generated by the usage of permaweb based apps.

Profit-sharing communities are a new business model for the decentralized web. According to it, founders of new projects can issue tokens for the tasks they want completed. Contributors, who are interested and suited for the job, start working on it, and after finishing it, they receive ownership and income.

Profit-sharing communities (PSCs) provide sustainable economics for apps, integrating a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance structure with profit-sharing token technology.

Profit-sharing tokens (PSTs) allow people who build websites and apps to earn money easily and flexibly. PSTs are a novel way of incentivizing and rewarding founders and contributors to a project.

Voting power in PSCs is determined by how many of the community's PSTs a person holds and how long they are willing to lock these tokens.

Profit-sharing communities allow PST holders to vote to mint more PSTs.

How to Buy AR

Trading AR is available on various exchanges, including Binance, Huobi Global, Gate.io, etc. Binance listed the token in May 2021.

To acquire AR, users will need to deposit cryptocurrencies, usually Bitcoin or Ether.

Arweave price is volatile. It depends on various factors, such as general market trends and the protocol's development. As of October 2021, Arweave's price was at its highest level of $74.03 on September 10, 2021.