ArWiki Research Report

ArWiki is a decentralised profit-sharing wiki on the Arweave Network. ArWiki works like Wikipedia, members of the community are paid Wiki tokens to contribute technical information, but the contents are not on regular databases like traditional websites. Every content is a transaction on Arweave which means it is permanently stored.

1. Background

(1) Founder and project brief

ArWiki was conceptualised by Williams to provide a central knowledge base where all information about Arweave can be accessed. Williams gathered a team of developers to build the project that launched in August 2021.

(2) Project financing overview

Arweave is supported by a sustainable endowment. Arweave raised $5 million in 2019 from well-known venture capital firms such as Coinbase, a16z, and Multicoin Capital. In March 2020, it raised $8.3 million. Major investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures.

(3) Overview of Tokens and Community

The $WIKI token issued by ArWiki is a profit sharing token (PST). PST is a token with a profit sharing mechanism created using the Arweave smart contract framework SmartWeave, which can share the revenue generated by all businesses on Permaweb. In such a way that revenue streams are generated by creating profit-sharing tokens, users and developers are able to trade assets by trading the profit-sharing tokens themselves. Permaweb applications make use of PST to distribute the revenue generated from using the application. For example, if a founder owns 10% of the tokens, they will receive 10% of all revenue generated by the application. Profit sharing tokens can also represent revenue ownership of specific projects such as Permaweb platform applications such as Bandplay and ArcLight. The ArWiki development team is a profit-sharing community on Arweave. Its community interests are represented by smart contracts in Arweave’s smart contract framework, SmartWeave. It has the following three advantages:

(1) Real-time bonuses can be obtained from the use of the application.

(2) Fairer ownership.

(3) Better governance.

(4) Analysis of core business: the difference and connection between ArWiki and Wikipedia

ArWiki works similarly to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free-content, openly edited and multilingual online encyclopedia collaborative project, through Wiki technology – everyone with the right permissions can simply use a web browser to modify the content. Wikipedia is mainly written by volunteers from the Internet. Any user who uses the Internet to access Wikipedia can freely choose to use anonymity, a pseudonym, or directly use his real identity to write and modify the articles in it. Wikipedia is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation established in 2003 to host Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects initiated by the Wikimedia family, supported primarily by donations.

Wikipedia’s economic source is mainly maintained by the funds donated by users. The purpose is to become a world encyclopedia and share human knowledge. Any content added to Wikipedia is required to be original. Any sentence or paragraph involving copyright must indicate the source, otherwise it will be unconditionally deleted, which ensures the accuracy of the content on Wikipedia. Since anyone can edit Wikipedia, editing functions may be restricted in some cases to avoid malicious disruption or damage. In Wikipedia, the three core points required for writing are: “neutral point of view”, “verifiable”, and “non-original research (not fabricated out of thin air)”. Therefore, the quality and rigor of articles in Wikipedia are very good.

ArWiki’s goal is to be a comprehensive, distributed, community-driven wiki that includes all major Arweave documentation and technical information. At present, the documents in the Arweave protocol are scattered on different websites. Anyone can proofread and integrate important information into ArWiki, and there will be professionals to review it. Among them, creators need some $WIKI to submit content, and at the same time ensure that there are some Arweave tokens $AR in the wallet (the purpose is to make the generated transaction acceptable by the Arweave network), waiting for moderator review. The moderator is generally a well-known member of the ArWiki community, but if he wants to approve or reject the modification and creation submitted by the user, he needs to lock the tokens of the same value as the wiki in his own “vault”. Moderators, after reviewing the submission, can choose to accept or reject it and generate a transaction on Arweave. If the creator is rejected, they lose $WIKI. If the submitted content is accepted for publication, the creator will receive a newly minted $WIKI token from the profit sharing community (PSCs) as a reward to the contributor, the amount is determined by the wiki value of the article published by the moderator and the creator. However, these tokens cannot be obtained directly, and will be sent to a temporary “vault”, which can only be unlocked after the block height of the Arweave network is greater than 4200. A “vault” is a place where users can participate in the ArWiki profit-sharing community by locking their balances.

Ricky Guzmán, the main developer of ArWiki, said:

We need to lock new tokens to prevent someone from cheating. Locked tokens can be chopped off, which is done through community voting.

The source of its tokens can be directly cut off, which also limits the malicious behaviour of moderators and creators to a certain extent. Since the transaction content is approved, new $WIKI tokens will be minted as rewards, so $WIKI has the risk of inflation.

After the author’s article is successfully reviewed, it will be published on the relevant interface of ArWiki. After reading it, regular readers can use $AR to “reward” it. The donation pop-up window allows up to 10 AR to be donated; if the user’s balance is less than 10 AR, up to half of the balance can be donated. After donating to the article, you can choose to like or dislike the content of the article. As long as you pledge more $WIKI than the value of the page, you can become a new sponsor and enjoy the benefits brought by the article.

Different from ArWiki, participating in various tasks of Wikipedia is itself a kind of voluntary service, but Wikipedia has also set up corresponding Wikipedia honors and rewards: According to the general habit of volunteer service, volunteers usually complete a certain amount of time after a certain period of service. Special tasks and special skills are usually rewarded with honors such as certificates, medals, pins, etc., so as to encourage volunteers to continue their service and express their gratitude. Compared with Wikipedia, the ArWiki token reward mechanism will be linked to personal economic income, and creators will be more cautious when organising and uploading data.

Of course, when writing an article, there are usually some problems, such as conceptual errors, typos, sentence barriers, etc. Therefore, the article modification function is necessary. There are also differences between the two in terms of article modification rules. In Wikipedia, you need to register as a member of Wikipedia when adding an entry, and non-members can only modify the content of the entry. A version of the entry is displayed to the user immediately after modification, equivalent to a preview. However, if the review fails, the staff will archive the entry to the unmodified version. In Arweave, there is an edit button under each article, and the article can be modified according to individual needs, and the modified content will generate a new transaction on Arweave.

In general, both ArWiki and Wikipedia are public collaborative platforms that anyone can participate in modifying or writing. Although the working method of ArWiki is similar to Wikipedia, the content is not stored in a regular database like traditional websites. Every content of it is a transaction on Arweave, which will be permanently stored and decentralised. Wikipedia is non-profit, and ArWiki’s reward mechanism will attract users’ attention even more. In terms of content, Wikipedia’s content is more rigorous, while ArWiki’s content mainly relies on the review of moderators, and at the same time earns tokens, which is more motivating.

2. Data analysis

(1) Analysis of $WIKI’s holding situation

As of December 16, 2022, the ArWiki project has lasted 16 months, and the number of $WIKI holding addresses have grown to 24. The holding situation of $WIKI is shown in the figure below:

(2) Analysis of the transaction situation of $WIKI

The transaction volume of the wiki coin holders’ wallet addresses is 38,771 in total. The address 0L z90s…hJhP9g, among them, has a transaction volume of 24,192 as of December 16, 2022, accounting for 62.4% of the total transaction volume. It is the most active wallet address of ArWiki in the Arweave ecosystem. wjones.ar has the second-highest transaction volume with 3912, accounting for 10% of the total transaction volume.. luckyr13.ar came in third with 3044 transactions.

There have been a total of 223 ordinary transactions on the $WIKI token address, of which 14 are token transactions and represent 6.3% of all transactions. It can be seen from this that there are fewer transaction addresses using $WIKI, and the liquidity of $WIKI needs to be further strengthened.

(3) Distribution of $WIKI account balance

As of December 16, 2022, 65,991,248 $WIKI had been issued by ArWiki. Among them, luckyr13.ar, as the creator of the wiki, has the highest account balance, accounting for 44.64% of the total balance at 29,455,686 $WIKI. arweavesam.ar comes in second with an account balance of 9,940,200 $WIKI accounts for 15.06% of the total balance. The third-highest account balance.is the address IaXzDFb…eu5SNwc is 9,900,000 $WIKI, accounting for 15% of the total balance.

(4) Descriptive statistics on $WIKI holdings

The standard deviation of the wallet addresses held by ArWiki is 6,445,094.34 and the average amount held by each wallet is 2,749,635.33. It can be seen that the distribution of wiki coins is uneven.

ArWiki’s token holdings are relatively concentrated, with a holding amount of 1 million wiki token holders. There are 7 wallet addresses, and the wallet balance accounts for 99.6% of the total tokens. These addresses are mainly the wallet addresses of ArWiki officials, investors and community staff. There are 17 wallet addresses with less than 100,000 coins held, and the wallet balance accounts for 0.4% of the total tokens.

(5) The distribution of $WIKI Locked Position

As of December 16, 2022, ArWiki has a locked position of 20,305,483 tokens, of which luckyr13.ar has a locked position of 10,100,001 tokens, accounting for 49.7% of the total locked position. arweavesam.ar has a locked position of 9,940,200 tokens, accounting for 49.0% of the total locked position. These two accounts accounted for 98.7% of the total locked positions.

(6) Comparison of $WIKI account locked positions

Luckyr13.ar wallet address locked accounted for 34.29% of the account balance, The locked position of arweavesam.ar accounts for 100% of the account balance, and there are 9 accounts with the locked position reaching 100%. There are 6 accounts whose wallet balances are all negotiable tokens.

3. Summary

1. The current amount of $WIKI in circulation in the market is 45,685,765, and the amount in lockup is 20,305,483, totaling 65,991,248.
2. Holders of $WIKI tokens are still relatively concentrated, distributed among the founding team of ArWiki, the community foundation of ArWiki, staff of ArWiki, and users who obtain tokens through the use of ArWiki.

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