Arweave’s Williams Announces R&D Foundation To Nurture Protocol Long Term

The Arweave Protocol, at the Arweave in Asia event in Singapore on Tuesday announced Digital History Association (DHA) to provide research and development services to the Protocol. This is a move aimed at nurturing the Arweave code infrastructure long term.

Sam Williams, founder of Arweave, said at Arweave in Asia, the first meeting by the protocol with the Asian crypto community, that the DHA is a Swiss non-profit foundation whose work will include maintaining the protocol and making it a desirable platform to build on.

Sam Williams at Arweave in Asia. Photo credit: PierreSteinClaysky/Arweave News

We want to set the network up for long term success by enabling people in the ecosystem to develop on the core protocol, Williams said to an audience of Asia’s crypto, founders and representatives of applications in the Arweave ecosystem including Bundlr, Akord, Decent.land and Community Labs.

DHA’s function as regards to the Arweave protocol will be different from how the foundation of many crypto firms are run.

So we see a lot of other, would you say foundations in the crypto ecosystem, they have an accidental leading effect on the protocols themselves, he said.

“We don’t want to do this. We want the protocols to stand for itself, but we want to be there to protect it. If it ever needs help and to make it more robust and to strengthen it over time. So we see our role as not defining where the protocol goes or proposing ideas.”

3/ The first order of business for @dh_association? ????

???? Releasing the Arweave 2.6 spec and testnet ????

Arweave 2.6 radically decreases energy usage in the network, increasing mining efficiency: more data, less power.https://t.co/e9JhTfrWJX pic.twitter.com/qRcLlNeBdz

— Arweave Team (@ArweaveTeam) September 27, 2022

On Tuesday, Arweave said on Twitter that some of its protocol and tooling development team will now come under DHA and the first order of business for the foundation will be releasing Arweave 2.6 specification and testnet. It said Arweave 2.6 drastically decreases energy usage in the network and increases mining efficiency: more data, less power.

Williams said the initiative was spurred by stability of the protocol and that research into how the protocol could improve would be funded along with grants for security audits.

Like we’ve seen all too recently or too much recently, crypto protocols where there wasn’t enough due diligence. So we want to red-team our own creation and find any weaknesses and solve them long before it’s a problem, Sam Williams also said.

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