Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #78: The ‘Fresh blood’ Edition
If one thing characterises the late week, it is the number of new projects jumping into the Arweave ecosystem. In fact, one can say that Arweave probably has a wider appeal to builders than to retail. I don't think that there is quite a similar evolution in other blockchain ecosystems, but if this continues to unfold, Arweave will become this quiet giant that people will use without even being aware of it.
If you want to know who joined Arweave, as well as some other news, just dive into our weekly report.
I. Arweave Network
After the transition to Arweave 2.6, Viewblock experienced some inconsistencies in displaying Arweave-related data. They acknowledged the issues and patched them just in time to catch yesterday’s peak in daily transactions, making the 24th of March 2023 the fourth-best day yet, with almost 4.4 million TXs.
This spike brought the total number of transactions on the network very close to the 650 million milestone, making us already wonder when we’ll encounter the transaction with the number 1 billion.
II. Arweave Ecosystem
Community Labs is here to deliver
Even with dev tools like Permaweb Cookbook and molecule.sh being a thing and offering resources for newcomers to build on Arweave, the need for even more resources like these is high. We all crave for adoption, but adoption is a painfully, multi-layered process: first, you have to create the tools and infrastructure for dApp developers in order to let them create useful dApps that, in turn will bring the end users.
Community Labs is fully aware of this life cycle and is committed to delivering exactly that. Beneath, you’ll find a detailed tutorial on how to build a decentralised discussion forum leveraging the capabilities of EXM created by their dev rel, ropats16.
Actually, ropats16 was on quite a streak because issue #2 of PermaBytes has just been released. It is a weekly publication that has a little bit (or should I say byte?) of everything that’s cool on Permaweb: a selection of news, an educative section and some relevant announcements. Check it out because we intentionally left some news uncovered in this weekly report so that you can find them only in their PermaBytes.
Also, our own and @onlyarweave observed that in order to be perfect, PermaBytes may need a logo and in the spirit of decentralisation, he already came up with a proposal. What do you think? Is it slick or what?
Oracles for the masses
Red Stone is probably one of the most important stones from the Arweave construct. They are the origin of Warp Contracts - the project that brought Arweave smart contracts (smart weaves) years ago. Not that we are interested in counting or something, but because of them we take for granted something that others struggled to achieve (yeah, I’m pointing to Filecoin’s virtual machine).
Still, some of you may remember that before developing Warp Contracts Red Stone was a project focused on oracles. Their excellence in this area is yet again acknowledged by reality - one of the most prominent L2s from Ethereum - zkSync is relying on Red Stone oracles.
LegalDAO receives a grant from PermaDAO
The road to Web3 dominance is not at all as one-sighted as some of us think. “Code is law” represents, at best, a metaphor. The truth is that without sound legal counsel, the framework that regulators will propose for Web3 will be as fair as the first “commercial contracts” between colonists and Native Americans. PermaDAO gets it. That’s why they are the first from the ecosystem that makes a move in this direction by offering a grant to LegalDAO - a Web3 knowledge-sharing platform exclusively for compliance & legal professionals.
A new project embraces Arweave
A well-known cross-platform tool for team communications - HackMD now offers the possibility to store user content on Arweave. We expect that the saying “picture or it didn't happen” will gradually evolve into “Arweave or it didn’t happen”.
And another one
The end of the week was apparently dedicated to Arweave databases. On Friday we had a space with WeaveDB and Glacier Network while Nader Dabit expressed his interest in this particular use case.
On this note, Outprog, the founder of EverVision, just informed us that Mind Network just joined our eco and will start using Arweave as the base layer for their products focused on privacy.
Aaaand, guess what, another one
For too long ArDrive and Akord represented a lonely couple in the ecosystem when it comes to projects that facilitate end-user personal uploads on Arweave. Now we are on the brink of experiencing a trinity with 0x3 Studio announcing their personal take on this niche: Iron Drive. The alpha version of a decentralised Dropbox on top of Arweave, as they describe their product, is already there and it leverages Bundlr and Warp Contracts to let Ethereum and Polygon addresses create their own smart contract for uploading data on Arweave directly.
While their implementation is just at the beginning, they already got our attention.
And who knows, maybe another one?
If you get FUD-ed by the US president, that’s something already.
Honestly, we don’t know much about Helium Network, just that they are undergoing a massive revamp of their inner workings, migrating to Solana and all. What caught our attention was that their CTO mentioned Arweave as a potential place to store data from their off-chain oracles. While their tech stack is somehow arcane for our current level of knowledge, if they are willing to use Arweave, we are more than eager to start understanding it. Anyway, this is a thread that we’ll follow for certain.
III. Things you won’t encounter on Arweave
Let me explain the meaning of the above image. Occasionally, we conduct some old-school searches on Twitter for keywords like “Arweave” using the “latest” selection. The procedure is relatively straightforward, and when Twitter API is somehow in a limbo state, it appears to be more reliable, or, to be more accurate, it was more reliable. Our latest search, conducted on 23rd March offered us tweets only up to 20 March. No matter how many times we pushed the refresh button, the results ended at the above tweet. We don’t know if they are limiting the results by the number of tweets displayed in a session or by dates. It is what it is.
This brings us to a slightly different discussion: open data and its importance. Now, it is obvious that by limiting the results Twitter is probably trying to cut some costs. What’s frustrating is that they definitely still have all the data stored and it’s still publicly available for anybody that really tries to get to it. By making this little twitch, Twitter unwillingly showcased to the world that Web2 is as close to open data as a casino is to charity. One main important feature of data in order to be considered open is “Availability and Access: the data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the internet.”
As you can see, it’s not necessarily about free data is about it being available as a whole, which is not the case. Worry not, Arweave’s data set, no matter how gateways will choose to serve it, will always be available as a whole, and, at least for the time being, as a nice perk, it’s also free to retrieve.
IV. Arweave explained by 3PO – thanks to ChatGPT
Oh dear! Where do I begin? Arweave is a cutting-edge technology that provides a decentralized platform for storing and sharing data. It uses blockchain technology to ensure that data is stored in a secure and tamper-proof manner. The Arweave network consists of a group of users who collectively store and maintain data. Each user contributes storage space and processing power to the network, and in return, they earn tokens for their contribution. These tokens can be used to access and retrieve data from the network.
With Arweave, users no longer have to worry about their data being censored or deleted by centralized authorities. This technology ensures that data is stored in a decentralized manner, making it almost impossible for anyone to tamper with or delete it. It's like having your own personal robot butler who stores all of your important data and makes sure it's always safe and accessible when you need it. Oh my! How delightful!
V. ICYMI
