Friday, June 14, 2024
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2023-02-24
By Pierre
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #74: The ‘Cold Storage’ Edition

This week we encountered a massive increase in the number of nodes in the network, as well as a twofold response to an older problem: the lack of hardware wallet integrations with Arweave. However, this is no longer a problem. Also, the ecosystem became even more vibrant than usual, with Bundlr hyping its colour pallet and coming up with some cool ideas for future functionalities.

About this and a lot more in the current weekly report!

I. Arweave Network

It appears that the number of daily transactions settled for good at above 2 million, or at least this has been the case for over a month now. What’s even more interesting and appealing for the network is the increase we can see in the number of nodes. If we remember correctly, at the end of last year, the number of nodes were consistently around 60, now we are at 95. We consider that this increase is justified when you take into consideration that Arweave 2.6 is just about to start and new, more affordable mining rigs are starting to appear on the network and begin to copy the weave. A tiny step towards the goal of becoming the most replicated data set in existence, but a step forward, nevertheless.

II. Arweave Ecosystem

ArDrive makes storage a breeze with Free Uploads!

Are you tired of the hassle of getting your hands on $AR? Fear not, fellow Arweavers, because we have some good news!

ArDrive announced this week that all users can now upload files up to 100KB in size for free! This means that users can create drives, rename folders, move files, and generate manifests with the web and mobile app, without having to worry about the cost of AR tokens. And you don’t even have to do anything special, users just need an Arweave wallet to start using the ArDrive apps and enjoy their free uploads. Now, it’s even easier to get started and take advantage of the benefits of the permaweb, so what’s your excuse for still using Google or Microsoft?

ArConnect finally answers: “Wen hardware wallet?”

Ok, we know, the question is usually phrased as “Wen Ledger support?”, but don’t fall into the brand fallacy. What Arweave needed was an integration to at least one hardware wallet solution so it would allow long-time holders to benefit from the improved security a hardware wallet brings to the table. And that’s exactly what ArConnect, the most used Arweave wallet, did. They partnered with Keystone Wallet to bring hardware wallet support to ArConnect.

What’s important to note is that Keystone announced this integration, which, I repeat, was desired by the entire community for ages. What do we want to stress here? For almost a week, we were quite unaware of this evolution that concerns the entire ecosystem. We, as in Arweave News, acknowledge the shortcoming that led us to overlook this announcement, so, from now on, we’ll implement a semi-automatic workflow to ensure that, hopefully, we’ll never be put in this position again. Also, by taking a look at who liked/retweeted this announcement until now, it becomes obvious that almost nobody from the Arweave ecosystem saw it, so yeah, maybe we are a little too focused on what’s happening in our own space while being almost totally oblivious when it comes to the broader picture.

When it rains, it pours with hardware wallets

It appears that’s the case on Arweave. After the drought of hardware wallets supporting Arweave, in the same week, not one but two solutions emerged. If the Keystone integration presented above has to do with a slick and proprietary hardware design, Permafrost Vault, a product launched by ArweaveApp, addresses the cypherpunk within each of us. It transforms any device with a camera, like a phone or a tablet, into an Arweave cold storage device. With a single payment of 0.75 $AR, you can take the app offline and create an unlimited number of accounts.

Metabox is coming to Arweave!

Another week, another new project is coming to the permaweb! This week, it’s the turn of Metabox, which recently announced its integration with Arweave, offering the permaweb as a storage option to its users. Metabox is an interesting new project which provides individuals and projects with multi-chain storage services for all their data needs. The team is currently working towards providing Arconnect wallet login on their dApp and the ability to make payments using AR by integrating everPay as a payment option, making the whole experience seamless for existing Arweave users.

We have to say it; we are excited about this news! As more and more projects join Arweave and the permaweb, the ecosystem is moving closer to becoming the default storage solution for the decentralised internet. Be sure to check out Metabox and see what their project offers!

Permafacts announced their SDK

Permafacts, the protocol that tries to find the truth through market movement, just announced that they will release an SDK soon. While this is just the prelude, the news that precedes the news, they let us take a peek at what they’re cooking, and it looks cool. Also, we have to admit, we carry an extra interest in their incoming SDK because we have been thinking for some time now, about becoming one of the first media outlets that will experiment with the implementation of Permafacts.

Bundlr evolved

A couple of days ago, Bundlr revealed its vision for the next leg up in Bundlr’s roadmap and its new visual identity. Don’t worry, the logo we all know and love remains unchanged. While visuals can definitely catch your eye, what’s even more impressive, is the technical stuff they envisioned for the future. They introduced “Proof of Provenance” as a new solution for data integrity. This will provide time stamps down to milliseconds and let developers create a metadata layer around transactions, greatly boosting traceability and data discoverability. The full relevance of this solution is still to be understood when we’ll first see it in use, but we expect that it will be a game changer as a tool to fight fake news and deep-fakes.

mARs Lab challenge is on a planetary scale

For a project that was launched officially only some months, mARs Lab is one that did a lot of work. This work is now almost fully articulated into a bunch of interconnected products. They’re working on a DEX (thetAR), an Atomic NFT minting tool (WeaveMint), a token search tool (TokenScope), and a name service (Polaris). If this is not impressive, I don’t know what it is.

To put them to the test and to help arweavers familiarise themselves with all those new tools, mARs Lab launched a challenge that is open until the first of April. You have all the details in the tweet below, so check them and participate; I know that I definitely will.

And yeap, your sight didn’t deceive you; they also have a name service – Polaris, bringing the total number of similar products in this niche to 4 (ANS, ArNS, ArNSe, and Polaris). As you may know, this week was quite a debate concerning this very niche, which appears to become the most competitive one in the entire ecosystem almost overnight. Maybe it is the moment to think of creating a meta framework/standard that will let all those projects integrate simultaneously into all the relevant Arweave infrastructure? Let’s give all, present and future, a fighting chance for our hearts.

AFTR Market announced the launch of their SDK

If Permafact’s SDK was only announced this week, AFTR already launched one. Being quite a technical project, it’s best we let them describe themselves:

AFTR Market is a site enabling users to create and configure AFTR repos. In short, AFTR repos are Arweave assets that encapsulate other Arweave assets. AFTR repos add a layer of security to your Arweave assets as management and governance are handled onchain.

Think of them as the layer that allows a DAO to exist on Arweave, letting the members of a community conduct a bunch of actions around a common treasury through voting.

One more step toward the Sarcophagus

Sarcophagus, the decentralised, immutable dead man’s switch running on Ethereum and Arweave, has announced its first major contract update this week in preparation for their public dApp testing! This update will change the way node fees are set, moving from a flat rate per wrap/rewrap to a monthly fee amount, meaning network participants must update their nodes.

If you’re not familiar with Sarcophagus, what’s exciting about the protocol is that it allows users to pre-define and pre-fund actions to happen on-chain in the event that they lose control of their wallet. The potential use cases for Sarcophagus are nearly infinite, particularly in the Web3 space when it comes to multisig systems and pseudonymous identities. The Sarcophagus builders also plan to expand the dApp to support lower cost EVM networks like Arbitrum and Polygon and to build tooling that makes it easier for third-party developers to integrate the dead man’s switch functionality into their dApps.

This update is a significant step forward in the development of decentralised applications and use cases, so congratulations to the team for being one step closer to a mainnet launch!

You can now send your funds to pierre.ar through everPay

Following decent.land’s successful launch of the ANS mint last week, we are seeing more and more news about projects announcing their integration with the name service! The latest such news comes from the team at everVision, who just announced that everPay now supports transferring funds with the use of ANS. No longer do you need to worry about having the correct wallet address of your friends, instead, you just need to know what their ANS name is and you’ll be able to send them payments in seconds! Just check out the team’s short video demonstration, and you’ll be convinced. And even though we love the technology shown in the video most, we have to say we really like their choice of music.

III. Things you won’t encounter on Arweave

Here you have a prime example of a phenomenon that we believe will occur more and more often in the next years. Apparently, a company that handles ultra-sensitive data such as DNA and social security numbers, acquired, more than 10 years ago, a competitor. During the merge, they consolidated the servers of both companies but gradually forgot about the existence of the legacy database of the acquired company. Left unchecked and unguarded, the legacy database was breached, and a lot of personal data was leaked in the process.

With the correct implementation, this thing couldn’t happen on Arweave. Imagine a protocol that uses Akord vaults to encrypt the DNA of each person into a different vault controlled only by the actual owner of the DNA. Imagine a way that those vaults could communicate with the outside world via a ZK (zero-knowledge) medium. This kind of product can be built right only on Arweave and…who knows; maybe there is somebody out there already building it 🙂

IV. Arweave explained by Huckleberry Finn – thanks to ChatGPT

Well, you see, Arweave is kinda like this powerful river that can store all our important stuffs like a treasure chest, and keep it safe from anyone who might wanna steal it or mess with it.

It uses this new way of keepin’ things safe called “Blockweave”, it makes sure no one can change or mess with the stuffs we put in there, once it’s in there it’s there forever.

It’s like a permanent storage spot, and you can store all sorts of big things like files and whatnot, and it don’t cost much neither. It’s kinda like findin’ a hidden treasure chest on the river bank, and it’s always gonna be there for you to come back to.

And the best part is, it’s on a big network of computers all over the place, so even if one gets taken out, the treasure chest is still safe on the others, so it’s like hidin’ it in a bunch of different spots, it makes it real hard for anyone to steal it.

V. ICYMI

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Pierre

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

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