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2022-05-13
By Pierre
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #37: The ‘Enigma’ Edition

What times do we live in! We peeked at the markets only for a second and the view was so gruesome that we ran back to our community to see what they’ve been up to this week. Well, besides the usual updates that culminated with some new features being released by ArDrive, Pianity, Permacast, and others, arweavers were concerned with an enigma: are we just good, or are we awesome? This feeling was accompanied by the usual conqueror spree Bundler accustomed us with.

To understand what are we talking about, make yourself comfortable and enjoy the week’s highlights on the Arweave ecosystem:

I. Arweave Network

Bundlr reaches 200.000 million TXs threshold

The inevitable has happened. Bundlr surpassed 200 million transactions. All the integrations they made with other ecosystems, the scaling they provided by making Arweave transactions exponentially faster, the “gasless” transactions for TXs under 300 kb – all of this converged into achieving this goal. From a total of approximately 245 million TXs on Arweave, Bundlr is responsible for over 200. I don’t know if you can ask more from a project that’s only a year old.

While the entire crypto space was in shambles, arweavers had a different dilemma

We are already accustomed to Arweave being the undisputed leader in Web3 Index. Still, in the last few days, according to the Web 3 Index, the revenue generated by the protocol has grown exponentially. From an average of about $50000/week to more than $300000/week. If you are not living under a rock, and you have the slightest idea about what happened in the past week in the broader space of crypto markets, you’ll understand why this spike was totally unexpected.

There were moments when the cost for 1 GB of permanent storage was as low as $2.5. Currently, the cost is around $3.7. In comparison, a couple weeks ago the cost was around $7. Looking from this perspective, for a spike like that in revenue, the quantity of the data stored on the blockWeave should have spiked even higher. That was not the case and the growth of the blockWeave remained within normal parameters. This conundrum was called by arweavers asking what happened?

Are we just that good? While the entire market was tumbling, Arweave was thriving? Then why didn’t we see a consistent increase in the Weave size? Was there a problem with data shown on Web3 Index or on Viewblock, given the high volatility of the markets? This was a mystery that sparked our interest.

First of all, Viewblock confirmed that the size of the weave shown in their chart is accurate, so, indeed, there was no unregistered spike in bought storage capacity. The next step was to talk with Web3 Index on discord. They provided their code for the integration responsible for fetching Arweave-related data, and they were left baffled as the rest of us.

They were investigating if there is an issue, or if the figures are indeed legit. Initially, they suspected that it could be a problem either with their integration or with the historical data prices they were importing from RedStone oracle (their implementation fetches the Arweave price feed from RedStone after every block, and based on that price feed they are calculating the actual fee paid to the network). Guess what, RedStone data seemed perfectly correlated with Arweave’s prices. So what actually happened?

Well, further digging is yet to be conducted in order to obtain a definitive answer, until then, a member of the community came up with what appears to be a valid explanation:

As you can see, this week on the 11 of May, a peak in the number of transactions occurred. It’s not an all-time high, but still, pretty impressive, with around 3.7 million TXs. If you follow the reasoning of TheWeaver you’ll understand that the network could genuinely have generated that spike in revenue without the necessary spike in data stored on the blockWeave. What are the implications of this potential scenario?

It will mean that for the past week, probably because of the volatility of the entire market, a lot of financial transactions occurred inside Arweave (a TX that carries a financial transaction, let’s say that you are sending 1 $AR to a friend, which has 0 Bytes in size but it will be charged as a 256kb chunk if you don’t use Bundlr).

Consequently, this means that besides the permanent storage, people are starting to use the network as a true Layer1, pumping liquidity into their wallets, sending it back to exchanges, interacting with different wallets, and so on.

This could be only a glimpse of what the revenue of the network will look like when a myriad of dApps will be fully operational on top of Arweave.

II. Arweave Ecosystem

Huobi Incubator started a series of Twitter spaces featuring Arweave projects

As we hope you know already, Huobi Incubator publicly disclosed its interest in the Arweave ecosystem a couple of months ago. As a part of their strategy to connect deeper with the ecosystem, they launched a series of Twiter Spaces where Arweave projects are invited to share insights about themselves and about Arweave. The first event took place yesterday and featured EverFinance, ArDrive, Open Web Foundry, and SevenX Ventures. You can listen to the entire discussion from the tweet below. This discussion lasted for more than an hour and a half but it deserves to be followed in its entirety as there is a lot of useful information, especially for newcomers.

Bundlr integration with zkSync

It seems that there isn’t a week without a new Bundlr integration. Will they ever stop? Do we want them to stop? Hell no. Let them spread permanence throughout the entire Web3. This week it was zkSync‘s turn to integrate with Bundlr. Now the users of zkSync, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, can pay for Arweave storage directly in their native token. We already covered this event in a dedicated piece, so if you want to know more, access this link.

Pianity conducted a facelift

Pianity, one of the leading marketplaces when it comes to music NFTs, conducted a series of changes on both its song page and its music player. One could say artists have always been obsessed with aesthetics. Well, these changes are definitely not only made to beautify their product. It’s obvious that they’ve put a lot of effort into delivering a better and seamless experience for the final user. If you want to know what new functionalities Pianity released, feel free to check the article linked in their tweet.

RSS3 launched its staking program

RSS3, the data syndication solution for Web3, launched a 365-day-long staking program. Even if we covered the RSS3 project many times, each time we do, we feel like it was never enough to fully explain the complexity and implications of this particular project. Let’s say that it has the potential to create platformless media, truly owned by the content creator.

They are doing this by interconnecting four mechanisms:

  • RSS3 Protocols classify information into four types – profiles, links, assets, and notes
  • RSS3 Apps access and publish data using RSS3 SDKs in the format defined by RSS3 Protocols
  • RSS3 SDKs fetch data from the RSS3 Network and publish data to RSS3 Supported Networks
  • RSS3 Network crawls data from various RSS3 Supported Networks, caches the data into its own efficient database. It also does some pre-processing, such as applying artificial intelligence recommendation algorithms and providing a search function.

With one of the primary sources of data being Arweave itself, it’s obvious why we are paying attention to any development on their part.

Permacast will support videos

Permacast launched its third iteration and the main enhancement is video support. This functionality couldn’t be timed better. In a time when Youtube is terminating accounts without any further notice, Permacast will offer video content creators safe heaven.

Imagine a dApp where you can primarily post your content (disregarding its nature, it could be podcasts or vlogs) without any fear of being de-platformed, and then using RSS feeds to post your content to various platforms. Wait, you don’t have to imagine – it’s already happening thanks to Permacast.

ArDrive introduced a new feature

Apparently, this week was about users and how to enrich their experience while surfing the Permaweb. ArDrive has continued to improve and released image previews inside the App. Now when you are staring at a jpeg file named “ugly.do.not.share03” and it’s not ringing any bells, you can just preview the younger content without having to open what could and up saving you from some embarrassment.

Joking aside, we have to acknowledge that functionalities like this one are paving the road to adoption for the average Web2 user. We have to understand that Web3 can and should offer a decent user experience too, not only data ownership and permanence.

Another resource for Arweave developers

Nader Dabit is clearly enamored with Arweave. After the release of this coding tutorial on Arweave, which we covered in the last weekly report, he has published a self-hosted, full-stack app for video storage and rendering. Pair this with the already existing open-source repository made by Permacast and you don’t have any excuse to complain you don’t know what to do when your content gets arbitrarily banned by various platforms.

III. ICYMI

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Pierre

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

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