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2021-11-12
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #13: Hard Fork Edition

Core improvements are being made to the Arweave protocol this week. It’s just 5 days until the upcoming hard fork will come into effect, re-balancing block difficulty and profitability. As we look to the future, we’re also reminded of our past. The contents of the Arweave genesis block from 2018 have been unearthed and – very fitting with 2021 – published as an NFT.

Along with this, we’re seeing improvements to Arweave’s block explorer, new partnerships, podcasts and funding from every corner of the ecosystem. Let’s take a deeper look at the week’s impressive selection of news.

I. Arweave Network

Arweave 2.5 introduces a hard fork at block 812,970

The core Arweave protocol will be upgraded at approximately November 17th at 11am UTC, or on the 812,970th block. The hard fork aims to lay the way for the 2.6 release, where hard-drive mining will become the most profitable method. The 2.5 release will introduce a sharper curve to mining difficulty, but the effects will be felt gradually.

Read the full changelog and inspect the code here.

The announcement was also broadcast by Binance:

Contents of the Arweave genesis block published as Koii NFT

Sandy from everFinance extracted data from the first ever block mined on Arweave and published it as an NFT on Koii. The contents were crowdsourced from early adopters and are now immortalized, both on-chain and in an NFT.

ViewBlock upgrades to display Arweave node count and bundled transactions

Arweave’s block explorer, ViewBlock, shipped an upgrade this week to display the true number of Arweave nodes in the network statistics panel at viewblock.io/arweave.

As well as this, bundled transactions are once again supported and it’s possible to expand bundles to see their internal transactions.

At the time of writing, the transactions within bundles are also being retroactively added to the main stats page for daily transaction count. When the script finishes running, we’ll surely see an even more dramatic growth spike than before.

The Open Web Foundry publishes guidance on testing WIP Arweave dapps

The latest Open Web Foundry deep dive looks at how to test Arweave dapps with ArLocal. For the full list with all deep dives and community spotlights, check the Arweave YouTube channel.

II. Arweave Ecosystem

The first Permaweb Pioneers panel goes live

Permaweb Pioneers, a decentralized podcast hosted as a collaboration between Only Arweave, Arweavers, and arweave.news, has just released the first in its series of panels. Contrasting last week’s episode with Akord, the panel is a more freeform discussion between core Arweave community members and developers. This edition explores what the permaweb needs to reach base feature parity with web2.

Arweave, ArDrive and Akash team up for a permaweb hackathon

Akash Network, a “cloud platform that offers containers with ephemeral storage” has just announced a new hackathon, in partnership with Arweave and ArDrive, which will offer $AKT and $AR tokens in reward for challenges completed.

“We are very excited to see support for Arweave and ArDrive grow in the Akash ecosystem. Persistent state between VM executions is a critical issue in the space — and we are thrilled to see this being addressed with Arweave”, says Arweave founder Sam Williams.

KYVE on stage at the Breakpoint Solana conference

Fabian Riewe and John Letey gave a talk about KYVE at Lisbon’s Breakpoint conference this week and then a follow-up interview with Journal Du Coin, a clip of which is available here.

DeSo protocol adds support for Arweave uploads via Python

DeSo, a social-focused L1 protocol, has enabled Arweave image support via its Python SDK. This means it’s possible to mint DeSo NFTs using Arweave as the storage layer in just a few lines of Python.

For technical details, check the GitHub repo.

everPay calls on Arweave PST communities for collaboration

As part of establishing a new standard for cross-chain PST bridges, outprog of everFinance has called on PST founders to come together and collaborate on the specifics that will enable Arweave DAO tokens, or profit-sharing tokens, to be bridged to Ethereum, improving liquidity and availability.

Sarcophagus closes $1.8m in funding

Sarcophagus, the Arweave-based dead man’s switch and first of its kind, has just closed $1.8m in funding in a round led by Placeholder Ventures.

“There is plenty of money floating around crypto land right now”, the founders note in an announcement post, going on to say, “there are very few people that truly understand what is happening under the surface. We optimized for expertise and experience, not valuation or round size”.

Instead of a community fundraising approach, Sarcophagus carefully chose a selection of knowledgeable VCs that will help guide and support the vision in the future.

1,000 AR on the line for Puzzle Weave #3

Puzzle Weave is one of the Arweave network’s oldest projects. A set of hand-drawn riddles, 8 panels and 16 characters, resolve to the passphrase needed to transfer 1,000 AR to a wallet of the cracker’s choice. Puzzle Weave #3 is still uncracked!

KYVE officially announces Solana as the next pool to archive

KYVE, a decentralized network of archival nodes which is seeing wide adoption for ledger storage, has just released news that the next pool to be added to the app will be Solana. This will provide an alternative to the revolutionary yet centralized SOLAR Bridge.

As well as Solana, KYVE now archives Avalanche, Cosmos and Moonriver. Read more about the future of Arweave as a layer 0 here and here.

III. ICYMI

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