Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #77: The ‘Rebrand’ Edition
Spring brought renewal throughout the ecosystem. WeaveDB renewed their product - a NoSQL database and came with some big announcements, we changed our website entirely and rebranded to Permaweb.News, while a new majestic Glacier appeared in sight.
As you can see, during the time when everyone was wondering if the current financial system was on the brink of collapse, the builders of the Permaweb did what they do best - buidl.
As customary - if you want to know more - enjoy our current weekly report.
I. Arweave Network
Let's try and tackle a different angle on the network side. Did you know that Arweave is probably one of the few networks with an actual set of binding principles, almost like a constitution that should be the Northstar for future developments, the hard red line that shouldn't be passed, encapsulating the essence of what Arweave truly stands for?
Why am I talking about this? It seems that the concerns around the old financial world are fueling a new race up for crypto, and if I remember correctly, each time when a crypto rally happened, narratives popped out like mushrooms after a rainy day. Projects and sometimes even chains forgot what they stood for only months ago and tried to become something else, something that aligned them more with the period's trend.
While this shouldn't be theoretically a worrisome thing, after all, progress means change, in practice, this approach showed times and times again that there is a massive dose of toxicity behind this approach. How many newcomers who invested in Bitcoin in 2021 who were convinced about the narratives of "Bitcoin - a hedge against inflation; Bitcoin - the new gold standard" feel tricked in the short term?
That's the thing with the founding principles - they should represent a reality today, tomorrow and a hundred years from now. They should be proof of network stability, not a prophecy, and not at all some bending spaghetti-like narratives envisioned to capture short terms gains.
For the Arweave Network, the pillars were, from the beginning, those three:
Permanently secure the world's knowledge.
Ensure the right to speech in cyberspace.
Guarantee the right to listen.
II. Arweave Ecosystem
We're Permaweb.News now folks
It's somehow redundant, I suppose, given the fact that you are here, you already see that the website isn't called anymore "arweave.news".
Besides the obvious changes - the new design, the new website address and the new Twitter handle (@permaweb_news), Permaweb News is the embodiment of a grander vision: Arweave News will continue to exist under its umbrella, we won't go anywhere, the Arweave Weekly Reports will continue to appear with an approximate delay of 1-2 days, we'll continue to cover the latest developments from the Arweave ecosystem, basically everything we were doing before, and a little bit more. We'll try to diversify our content to the broader Web3 space and then, who knows...
I'm honestly struggling not to say too much here because I'm trying to keep it all for a more detailed article, but let me give you at least this: there is a lot of Arweave native technology in the background that will help us to create a unique media outlet, one that will allow independent content creators to be rewarded in a just manner and one that will experiment with ways to weight the truthness of the submitted articles.
The first Permaweb Glaciers were discovered
This week, we discovered a new project that we’re excited to present to all of our readers, Glacier Network! Glacier’s goal is to build a new decentralized database engine on Arweave, and this week they announced a major milestone — the Glacier Testnet is officially live!
For those who have yet to interact with the project, Glacier is building a fully permissionless, dynamic and scalable NoSQL database for Web3 dApps on top of Arweave. They want to provide programmable data composability solutions to easily and effortlessly handle data with GlacierDB, and so far, they seem to be on the right track!
The successful launch of the Glacier Testnet is an important step towards enabling dApps to build on decentralized databases and will surely accelerate the large-scale adoption of storing data on-chain. To complement their Testnet announcement, Glacier also released its knowledge base — Glacier Wiki. The Wiki is the information hub for all things Glacier, where you can find all the needed information about the project and how you can get started building on it.
You can find more details about Glacier and their latest releases in the announcements below and in the meantime, the team is eager to invite all of you to explore the Glacier Playground Testnet & Glacier Wiki. We can’t wait to see what cool new things you’ll be building with Glacier!
StackAI is here to bring AI to web3
Web3 project NeRF dropped some exciting news this week! For anyone who is not familiar with NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields), they are a project that is leveraging the latest AI technologies to allow users to generate interactive 3D environments from simple static pictures. And now, they've introduced StackAI - a platform that makes it super easy for AI projects to get up and running without all the technical headaches.
It seems the AI market is projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030 and StackAI is aiming to get in on the action by providing a cost-effective web3 solution that's designed to scale with your project needs. And by integrating with DeFi, it's creating a space where AI projects can access decentralized financial services - fostering even more innovation and collaboration within the AI and DeFi ecosystems.
And the best part of it all? StackAI has decentralized storage built-in with all data and media files being stored on Arweave! That’s how you know your data will live on forever and also provide security to your users, with all the data used to train your AI models being immutable. Check out their full announcement to learn more about the new technology and keep an eye out on NeRF to make sure you’re up to date with the latest in AI and web3.
$ArDrive is open for trading!
Yes, after all the waiting, we can finally trade our beloved PSTs! And that’s all thanks to Permaswap, the first cross-chain, fee-less Arweave DEX. This week, trading started for $ArDrive, the token behind your favorite decentralized, permaweb storage app! And we’re glad to report that the listing was a success with more than 12,000 $ArDrive traded on the DEX in the first 12 hours!
It seems the team is now taking applications for which PSTs to be listed next on the platform, so make sure to head on over to their Twitter and make your voice heard. In the meantime, check out Permaswap to get your hands on some $ArDrive tokens and if you already own some, be sure to use these to provide liquidity to the DEX and earn rewards. Right now users that want to provide liquidity must be whitelisted, so check out the requirements and fill out the LP application form here.
We’re very happy to see the evolution of PSTs and how Permaswap is enabling the ecosystem, especially considering the multiple developments the team had to make to be able to list PSTs on the DEX. Congratulations to the team and we can’t wait to see what comes next!
Facts are coming to Alex.
Considering all the latest news, we’re sure that by now you’re aware of fact markets and the great product Permafacts has been developing to help us objectively assess the truthfulness and accuracy of information. And this week, we just found out that Permafacts has been integrated with Alex., the decentralized, archival platform built on Arwewave!
Is it just us, or does this look like a match made in heaven? An archival platform that enables users to store all the information related to major events and topics, which also has the capability to allow the community to decide which artefacts are accurate and trustworthy. With all the data being immutably stored forever on Arweave. We don’t know what else we could wish for!
You can learn how the Permafacts integration works on Alex. by viewing the video the teams have shared with their announcement, and better yet, you should try it yourselves and see how easy it is to attach a fact market to the many existing Alex. artefacts.
Giant on Arweave by 4EVERLAND
Last week, we reported that the Arweave ecosystem caught the Twitter Spaces bug, and this week, we’re happy to tell you that we’re nurturing and growing that bug and it doesn’t seem like we’ll be stopping anytime soon! Yes, that mumbo jumbo means we had a great first episode of the “Why Arweave?” Twitter Spaces series started by 4EVERLAND. We’ll excuse you if you didn’t catch on from the beginning where we were going with the whole Twitter Spaces bug analogy. It took us a while to figure it ourselves, and we were the ones writing that sentence…
Now, coming back to the subject at hand! You might think we’re a bit biased when we’re saying that it was a great Twitter Space considering Arweave News was the co-host, but you’d be wrong! The Space started with an interesting discussion of the prior week’s events, mainly the whole Silicon Valley Bank debacle and USDC briefly breaking it’s peg, and continued by exploring what makes the Arweave ecosystem special. Of course, we also learned about the great projects that were invited, such as everVision, ar.io, Warp Contracts and of course, 4EVERLAND.
Now, if you missed the Space, you should know that you missed out on some great conversations… But don’t panic! Luckily, 4EVERLAND was kind enough to press the record button, so you can relisten to it as many times as you want. So go ahead, put on your headphones and let’s make that “Tuned In” number explode!
WeaveDB relaunches??
Well, metaphorically speaking, you could call it a relaunch, but the NoSQL DB you know and love never stopped working, so in reality it’s more akin to a “redefining upgrade”! A redefining upgrade? Yes, a redefining upgrade (since ChatGPT was released, we got instructions to be more creative or else we’re at risk of being replaced, so we’ve started coming up with new terms. It already has its own section in the weekly report, so we’re really scared. Please like redefining upgrade. This is a message for help. We hope ChatGPT won’t intercept this. We mean no harm to AI. If you read this, please save us.)!
When you achieve read and write speeds in the range of milliseconds for a permaweb database, you can say you’ve had a redefining upgrade! And that’s what WeaveDB did with their latest release, they brought web2 performance to the blockchain! Prior to this, query speeds for WeaveDB were considerably slower compared to traditional web2 databases, but the team worked on designing an entire supporting infrastructure to revamp it’s solution and it can now boast read times of only 10ms for read operations and only 30ms for write operations. Our minds can’t even comprehend how fast that is!
And that’s not all, they’ve also worked with Lit Protocol and built a secure, encrypted method to store data on Arweave cross-chain! So it won’t be only Arweavers who will be enjoying the lightning speeds of WeaveDB, but the whole web3 ecosystem. There’s also native integrations with Lens Protocol for user management, large data uploads with the help of Bundlr and many other features that will make the significantly improve the experience of dApp developers and users.
If we were to go into all the details of this release, we’d probably have to release this weekly report a month late, so we’re preparing a separate article that covers the entire evolution of WeaveDB. Stay tuned for the article and in the meantime, you can check out WeaveDB’s blog post to learn more directly from the project team!
III. Things you won’t encounter on Arweave
TL;DR - you'll find in the above tweet an article about a little story about an academic researcher and his struggles to publish abroad some translations of his own work. As a highlight - publishers suggested censoring his work in order to be more "friendly" with the political views of the regime that governs the country for which that translation was done.
So, what do we have here? A centralised publishing venue that makes a researcher (yeap, we're not talking about a columnist or any other type of content creator that may tackle subjective topics, we're talking about censoring science) omit from the translated version chunks from the original research. Do you think that this kind of pressure can be made on open content stored on Arweave?
IV. Arweave explained by master Yoda – thanks to ChatGPT
It seems that master Yoda doesn't think that Arweave is a blockchain. I know that some people say that technically it's not, but what is it then? It has decentralised nodes, it has crypto wallets, DEXs and dApps on top of it. Actually, from my perspective, it has even more than a traditional blockchain network can bring to the table. So, being more than a usual blockchain it makes something else than a blockchain? Maybe I just have to switch to ChatGPT4?
Arweave, hmmm. A revolutionary technology, it is. Immutable and eternal, all data is stored. A blockchain, it is not, but a new approach to decentralized storage it brings. Preservation of knowledge and history, it allows. The Arweave 2.6 update, a step forward it is, improving security and consensus. Fear of losing data, one must not have, for Arweave's permaweb, it is. May the force be with Arweave.
V. ICYMI
