Friday, June 14, 2024
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2022-12-02
By Pierre
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #65: The ‘Truth Challenge’ Edition

The 65th weekly report covers quite a busy week. The network, almost as clockwise, expanded above the 110 TB threshold, but the true frenzy happened in the ecosystem.

A couple of days ago, the announced anti-party took place in Gather Town and brought quite some new developments – Super STAMPS, the official launch of Alex. and the start of a writing competition held by Permafacts – just showcasing some of the action. And that’s only what happened in one single event.

If you want to know what happened throughout the Permaweb in the last week, just tap into our Arweave weekly report.

I. Arweave Network

This week an interesting new milestone has been successfully met by the blockweave. Its size grew to over 110 TB. As you can see, the accentuated slope that begins at the end of 2021 – arguably around the end of the crypto bull market, doesn’t seem to stop any time soon. A movement that is not driven by price, but by demand, it’s truly a sight for sore eyes in these moments. Also, silent work is conducted in plain sight in preparation for probably even steeper slopes in the not-so-distant future. We won’t elaborate much on this, but everyone who wanders a little into ViewBlock’s will see the signs.

II. Arweave Ecosystem

Alex. is immortalising China’s Zero-COVID policy

As we’ve presented in one of our previous weekly reports, the Permaweb is already being used to preserve the facts of the world’s most important events through Alex., the decentralised archival platform. Even though the project launched just a few weeks ago, multiple archiving pools have already been created, covering topics such as the US mid-term elections and the crypto “crunch” of 2022. This week, the protocol has launched yet another important pool covering the events surrounding China’s Zero-COVID policy. This will help preserve the facts surrounding the current China situation and will ensure our history is censorship-free. Head on over to Alex. to play your part in safeguarding our history and contribute to the archiving pool.

ArConnect 1.0 is on the horizon

The team at ArConnect announced this week the start of the Closed Beta for ArConnect 1.0, the complete overhaul of the ArConnect experience. The updated version has been completely refactored and besides the new user experience, it also includes a host of new features such as internalisation, devtools for Arweave dApps and an explore section where users can learn more about existing projects in the Arweave ecosystem directly from us – Arweave News. Even though access to the beta is currently restricted to selected users, everyone can learn more about what the team has developed by watching their Arweave Lisbon presentation. To find out when the Open Beta launches and be one of the first to sign up, make sure to follow them on Twitter!

PermaDAO and ArWiki – a match made in heaven

This week we learned about the new cooperative partnership between PermaDAO and ArWiki, two leading initiatives in the Arweave ecosystem that are focused on providing information and education to all of the ecosystem members. The goal of this newly formed partnership is to further support the process of ArWiki’s content localisation to Chines – a process that has already been started by PermaDAO. Check out more about this exciting new partnership and learn how you can contribute to these initiatives!

Have you joined the hottest Anti-Party of the year?

On the 30th of November, Forward Research hosted the Anti-Party 2, their yearly event focused on bringing together builders from all around the ecosystem in order to further advance Arweave’s development. This year, before a quick brief of the latest advancements on Arweave held by no other than Arweave’s founder – Sam Williams, we witnessed the official introduction of Alex., and the presentation of the hottest new developments from STAMPS and PermaFacts.

While we covered Alex. in a distinct entry above, let us dive into what Tom from STAMPS and JShaw from PermaFacts presented because it was quite a feast:

Tom introduced  rewards for distributors – a way to allow dApps that implement STAMPS to retain a portion of the reward generated by a STAMP that was conducted on that particular dApp and Super STAMPs:

JShaw used the Anti-Party as a way to simultaneously showcase how Permafacts works and to present the truth challenge – a competition dedicated to journalists – winkwink. Guess what, we have some assertions kept for this challenge, do you have some as well?

If you weren’t able to join, follow Forward Research on Twitter and find out when the recording is made available.

Did anyone say lightning fast? It must have been Bundlr…

When we think about the “Bear” market, the things that first come to everyone’s mind are decreasing values, losses, and a general sense of uncertainty. Short-term, these are the most impactful, but we believe the biggest risk of them all has good projects that stop building. Luckily, the projects in the Arweave ecosystem have proven quite the opposite in the last few months and the latest example is Bundlr, who announced an update to their network this week. With this new update, Bundlr Network is now 60% faster, allowing users to upload data within 20ms. If that’s not lightning fast, we don’t know what is. Don’t waste any time and check out the new improvements by heading over to bundlr.network.

decent.land – the place that never stops growing

We’re beginning to think decent.land’s team does not sleep, considering the recent flurry of releases in the past few weeks. In our last weekly report, we highlighted the release of their updated protocol Ark v2 which was fully refactored using EXM, and their launch of new developer tooling, molecule.sh. This week we’re here to tell you that in the meantime molecule.sh has already received an update, introducing new features such as lucky-draw, address-to-owner and base functions allowing Arweave contract interactions to be signed by Ethereum wallets.

If this wasn’t enough, they’ve also launched full compatibility between the Ark and NEAR protocols, supporting connections between Arweave, NEAR and EVM (0x) addresses. This means that your Ark ID can contain references to the three types of chains that were previously non-interoperable. Go link your NEAR identity today by heading over to Ark Protocol and make sure to read all the other NFT-related updates from decent.land in their announcement.

Have you heard of Web3 Working Group?

If you haven’t, you might hear about them after this week. The Web3 Working Group is a non-profit organisation which aims to educate both consumers and regulators on the underlying infrastructure of Web3. Last week they announced a fund-raising round of $2 million from a host of projects building the infrastructure of Web3, including Arweave. The team plans to use this money to spread awareness about how Web3 infrastructure is transforming the structure of the web itself and start educating consumers that Web3 is much larger than DeFi, ICOs and airdrops. To learn more about their vision and strategy, check out the linked thread below, written by one of the organization’s co-founders, Amy James.

III. Things you won’t encounter on Arweave

So, what’s the problem revealed by the news below, and why won’t you encounter it on Arweave? Well, one can “decode” it in multiple ways, but a quite decent way to put it is this: Apple, as a centralised entity, is more exposed to punitive actions from governments than decentralised structures. Pair this potential “weakness” with the fact that the interests of a centralised entity are not at all as clear and transparent as the goals of a decentralised protocol and you will end up with what happened with Apple’s AirDrop feature in China.

Why never on Arweave? Being a decentralised protocol Arweave can successfully resist both – the pressure of external actors and the pressure that is derived from undisclosed internal goals. Building on Arweave comes with a seal of immutability by default. A true Permaweb dApp won’t be altered by governments or by its creators. It will simply continue to exist.

IV. ICYMI

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Pierre

Passionate about Arweave, Archeology, and NFTs. Playing with words, dirt, and images.

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