Thursday, June 20, 2024
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2022-06-10
By Pierre
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #41: The ‘Birthday’ Edition

This week Arweave celebrated its fourth anniversary. It’s not exactly a jubilee, so for this occasion, a flashy parade wasn’t on the menu. Nevertheless, the value of the ecosystem was shown in a more practical manner: Kwil App got the second place out of more than 120 participants in a hackathon on ETH Shanghai 2022.

As is customary during a holiday, there were also gifts: Permacast launched its incentivised testnet and rewarded both the initial Permacast users and those who will start to use the protocol from now on.

Below, you’ll find more about those and other news about the ecosystem. Enjoy!

I. Arweave Network

Arweave just turned 4

Four years ago, Arweave was born. That made us realise the paradoxical nature of Arweave. By Web3 standards, it is already an established project. We all know how time warps in the crypto space and a year passed feels like ten in another environment. Most of today’s Ethereum infrastructure was already in place when Ethereum was four years old. Still, taking the time scale Arweave aims for, it is still in its infancy. After the first wave of robust infrastructure settles down and the entire mining mechanism consolidates, migrating to an endowment-based economy, we still won’t be capable of deeming Arweave as finalised. It is a type of project that you know will surpass your life span in its development. All you can do is nurture it until another generation takes the lead. Happy birthday, baby leviathan!

II. Arweave Ecosystem

Kwil App rocked at ETH Shanghai 2022

Kwil App, one of the most tech-savvy projects from the ecosystem, proved its worth while competing with the entire crypto space. They participated in one of the ETH Shanghai 2022 hackathons and secured second place out of more than 120 participants. ETH Shanghai 2022 was a feast for the entire Web3 community that celebrated the impending Merge of Ethereum – the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. The project showcased by Kwil App was a product that facilitates the automatic DB migration from Web2 infrastructure to Arweave storage.

While others are building hype, Arweave projects are building infrastructure to pull Web2 projects into the blockweave.

4everland incentivises its community members to participate in the growth of the project

4everland, the project that brings together IPFS and Arweave (besides many other features), launched a community contributor program that will empower any community member to earn rewards for their meaningful work.

4EVERLAND Community Contributor Program aims to encourage more users to get involved in our community development! We see this program to be a users-centered one. So, let’s build a strong, healthy and prosperous Web3 community together!

There are four areas where one can contribute: design and content creation, moderation and localisation, promoting, ideation and feedback.  So, if you feel you can provide value in any of these areas, just give it a try, they are waiting for you.

Akord upgrades its user interface

Akord continues to smooth the edges of its product making permanent storage even more appealing for the casual internet user. This time they presented a preview of how one can experience the media content stored with Akord on the spot. Users could choose between single image or gallery mode, to zoom in and out inside the app, and of course, switch between light and dark mode. While we are mesmerised by the technical implications of Arweave, we usually forget the need for a clean and easy-to-use interface. Akord is one of the projects that constantly reminds us how things should be done in this department.

ArDrive fine-tunes its features

On the same note, ArDrive launched another feature that eases the user experience inside their dApp. They introduced the “eject button”. Now you can easily detach public shared drives from your account. Let them have their own life. Some drives are just made to be free!

Permacast offers value for its users

Permacast, the project that lets your podcasts live forever without the fear of censorship, rewarded its users. It launched the testnet version of permawebDAO tokens. Everyone who uploaded content on Permacast received a share of those tokens (that could be swapped with the real deal on a 1:1 ratio when permawebDAO will be fully functional). Besides that, they got multiple times the amount of $AR they used for storing their podcasts on Permacast.

Haven’t used Permacast yet? That’s fine; you will still qualify for rewards if you start to upload your audio content on Arweave using Permacast. From now on, for the foreseeable future, Permacast will match the cost of upload in $AR and will still grant testnet $PWT. So, if you are a podcaster, a music creator, or just want to permanently store and share audio files that are under the public domain, this is the moment to shine and be rewarded for it.

KYVE launched KYSOR

In their quest to offer a seamless experience throughout the entire Web3, KYVE launched a feature that will let KYVE nodes run a single program on every pool, disregarding the pool’s standard.

Without KYSOR for every pool, the node runner has to get the binaries manually. If you want to run on another pool which has a different runtime you again have to manually obtain the binaries. Furthermore, if a pool ever upgrades to a newer protocol node version, you have the same procedure as before. Even worse, you might miss the update and receive a timeout slash for being offline.

Running nodes with KYSOR has the following benefits:

  • Only use one program to run on every pool

  • Not installing and compiling protocol binaries manually for every pool

  • Getting the new upgrade binaries during a pool upgrade automatically and therefore don’t risk timeout slashes

  • Make running protocol nodes standardised and easier

Learning never ends when it comes to Arweave

Each week new resources about Arweave are popping up. The knowledge pool gets bigger every day, ranging from in-depth tutorials for developers to simple “how to use” explanations for casual users. Let’s see what happened content-wise, besides the usual podcasts like Arweave’s Only Permaweb Pioneers, or the Deep Dive series held by OWF.

Nader Dabit, the developer that took the role of evangelising the ways of Web3 to anyone who wants to start coding, continued his journey (literally) of spreading knowledge about Arweave. This week he was in Prague.

ArDrive released a condensed informational capsule in the form of a 6 minute Youtube video that shows step by step how you can save all of your Instagram data on the permaweb.

Somehow, between teaching workshops throughout the globe, Nader has time to uncover other builders sharing their experience on building on Arwveave too. Meet @rakis_me, the founder of permanotes.app, and a prodigious content creator when it comes to Web3 coding tutorials.

III. Things you won’t encounter on Arweave

There are a lot of things related to Arweave that, for one reason or another, escape our coverage, and we are sorry for that. On the other hand, there are some things that you will never encounter on Arweave. This new section will highlight these kind of news. It will remind us what can happen if we trust a centralised entity with our data.

This week was the turn of Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland to taste the benefits of Web2:

https://twitter.com/JustinRoiland/status/1534670496402268160?s=20&t=yn6DqTGhr4DCWk3zRBkgQw

Fortunately the issue was solved rather quickly and Justin regained the control over his own content. Still, there is this implicit questions raised by a Twitter user: Will a centralised service be just as available to solve the issue it has just caused if you are just a simple user?

IV. ICYMI

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Pierre

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

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