Saturday, June 15, 2024
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2023-02-03
By Pierre
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #71: The ‘Breaking old records’ Edition

Arweavers elevating #nostr, the network smashing heights that were set during the last bull run, elements that make a usual week on the Permaweb. Ah, and we just asked a fictional french guy what he thinks about Arweave.

If you want to know more about these and other juicy news from the ecosystem, just dive into our weekly report.

I. Arweave Network

The first month of 2023 was explosive. We experienced the highest count in transactions ever. Remember the peak Arweave experienced in the past bull run during the NFT frenzy? It was dwarfed by transactions in what is still a bear market. But hey, these are only numbers. The real strength of the network resides in its fundamentals.

If you didn’t look, you might have missed this week’s Twitter thread from Sam Williams about why Arweave will never use a fee market for storage. We encourage all our readers to check it out, but in the meantime, we’ll try to give you a short explanation below.

Why is this such a game-changer for permanent data storage?

To understand, we need to compare Arweave to how traditional contract-based blockchains store data. In these systems, each data item needs to be committed with information about its storage term, who should store it, how many replicas there should be, and so on. This means that each commitment must be adjudicated separately, just like smart contracts.

Here’s the problem: contract-based storage doesn’t scale well. Ethereum and other smart contract systems have struggled with scaling even when they’re only dealing with one smart contract per app. And in a typical app, there could be thousands to millions of files! That’s a lot of contracts to adjudicate.

Arweave takes a different approach. Instead of trying to handle millions or billions of contracts, it has just one: the endowment. The endowment is a single reward pool and a single merkle root for a massive pile of data. When new data is added, the merkle tree is updated and tokens are added to the reward pool, but the chain itself doesn’t get bogged down or requires increased computation.

A few services, like EverVision and Bundlr, are already using Arweave to upload around 3 million pieces of data per day across just a few thousand transactions. And as Arweave grows to the size of the centralised web, the number of bundles being submitted is going to outpace the number of slots in Arweave blocks. But here’s the cool part: Arweave will simply bundle the bundles! This allows for trees of data of infinite depth to be committed to the network in a single transaction.

Think about it: with this system, there’s no reason Arweave couldn’t ingest all of the web’s data in a single transaction. And the best part? No fee markets, ever! There’s no reason to limit the number of users that can use the network. Thanks to the power of trees of data of infinite depth, Arweave is changing permanent storage forever.

II. Arweave Ecosystem

WeaveDB leverages Bundlr to build the Firestore of Web3

Hot of their pre-seed round, WeaveDB announced a new integration with Bundlr to facilitate the storage of large data sets. If you’re a developer, you might that know that storing large files such as images and videos in your database will quickly result in it becoming painstakingly slow. That’s why storage objects were invented in the first place. And now, WeaveDB is bringing this functionality to the permaweb! With this new release, you can easily upload data using Bundlr and store only the metadata (transaction ID) in you WeaveDB, ensuring that your database remains quick and that your data is stored securely on the permaweb. Be sure to check out this new feature and if you need any help, check out their newly released tutorial.

Did anyone say decentralised collective memory?

Yes, they did! And it wasn’t really anyone, but Sam Williams! He sat down this week with Austin Federa, on the latest episode of the Validated podcast, to discuss Arweave and how the permaweb is not just a means of preserving data. They covered how permanent information storage can help individuals resist the grip of an authoritarian regime and how the permaweb could power a decentralised collective memory. Make sure to check out the interview and learn more about why Arweave was built and what it can mean for your future!

everVision is empowering content creators

This past week, everVision announced a brand new partnership with Atem Network, the decentralised content creation protocol! If you’re not familiar with Atem, their protocol is dedicated to helping creators easily build their communities and tokenise their content in Web3. As part of the partnership, Atem will be using everVision’s Arseeding technology to store the data of their creators securely and permanently, together creating the content economy of the future. Check out the announcement and see for yourself how you can become the next Web3 influencer!

Another week, another decent.land update

This week decent.land released its 20th update, unveiling a whole bag of goodies for its users. First off, they announced the sneak preview of their Arweave Name Service (ANS) public minting! It seems we don’t have to wait much longer until we find out if we are on the initial whitelist and how we can mint our own identity! The team will provide updates on their Discord, so make sure to join and stay tuned.

Besides the ANS mint, the team has been hard at work improving their developer tooling for EXM, molecule.sh. This week, they open-sourced the technology that will underly their ANS mint, more specifically, molecule.sh will now be able to call on Redstone to get data related to the AR price and also everPay, to allow for cross-chain payments! As an added bonus, four new chains have been added to molecule.sh, so users can now sign transactions with wallets from the Tezos, Fuel, Aptos, and Astar networks!

And that’s not all, they also somehow managed to squeeze some time in to integrate their Ark Protocol v2 UI with RainbowKit. Don’t worry, we didn’t know what RainbowKit was either, but we were delighted to find out that through this integration, we can now use Ledger, Coinbase, Metamask, and a host of other wallets to connect to the service! We’re getting exhausted just writing about all of these updates, so we’re not entirely sure how the team manages to build them… Read their blog post to find more details about all the great things they’re doing!

Warp Contracts is outsourcing the execution from your CPU!

Just today, Warp Contracts announced the release of D.R.E.! And no, we aren’t getting the holographic version of one of the greatest rappers on the permaweb just yet… But we are getting the next second best thing! D.R.E. stands for a Delegated Resolution Environment, a tool that outsources the execution of smart contracts from your device’s CPU to an external, decentralized set of validators that can provide near-instant response times! What this means for the user is that you don’t have to worry about the performance of your device when interacting with dApps and that there’s absolutely no more worrying about what kind of operations are carried out by the smart contracts. The service is now officially in BETA with two validator nodes already available so you can start testing it outing right away. Make sure to check out the Warp’s full announcement and dive into all the technical details of this amazing release!

Some hints for a new fantastic beast in the land of decentralised socials

Outprog, the founder of everVision and the mind behind the concept of SCP (storage-based consensus paradigm), released an interesting thread where he presented his take on #nostr, the decentralised protocol for open socials envisioned by the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. The main takeaway is that SCP is basically #nostr + permanent storage, and the importance of permanent storage is still to be fully understood by the creators of the new decentralised socials (well, maybe this idea is not that clearly spelled in Outprog’s thread, as the first one, but is my firm belief). What’s interesting is that he signaled that PermaDAO contributors are already working on an Arweave version of #nostr.

What is even more interesting is that an hour after Outprog’s thread, decent.land came with another thread announcing support for #nostr on Molecule.sh.

III. Things you won’t encounter on Arweave

Due to Elon Musk’s desperate search for new revenue streams for Twitter, we were greeted with the news that the Twitter API will no longer be freely accessible. Starting next week, developers, users, companies, and even research institutions will be required to pay in order to access the API, even if it is for interacting with their own Tweets. In other words, you only have access to your data if you pay the centralized company that is already benefitting from it through the sale of ads designed to target you better. Alas, we’re seeing the platform that was supposed the be the “town square” encouraging free speech turn into a locked-down fortress that doesn’t allow any third-party clients or even access to your own data…

On Arweave, there’s never any question over data sovereignty. The answer is always the same – YOU own your data, and YOU decide how you want to access your data. Also, public data will be forever public. The network only provides the data storage model that ensures it will be stored forever and that you will always have access to it. What more could you wish for?

IV. Arweave explained by Hercule Poirot – thanks to ChatGPT

Arweave, mon ami, is a digital storage solution most ingenious. It is built upon the most unbreakable of foundations, the “Blockweave,” and it is a fortress against the ravages of time and the machinations of those who would seek to corrupt or destroy it.

Like a locked room at the scene of a crime, its treasures are kept safe for eternity, and its network is as vast and far-reaching as the British Empire itself.

And like a good detective, Arweave will preserve one’s legacy and memories for generations to come, and will stand the test of time.

V. ICYMI

 

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Pierre

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

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