As Arweave passes 1 billion transactions in total

In the Arweave 2023 semi-annual report earlier this month, SCP Ventures captured 940 million transactions and was expecting to cross the 1 billion mark in August, but with such a surge in transactions, the second half of the year is off to a good start - the Arweave network has now officially surpassed 1 billion transactions.

This is the second milestone after the Arweave network exceeded 100 petabytes in size, which, as founder Sam said, is a historic achievement since Arweave was established six years ago, with the Mainnet launching five years ago!

Among the factors contributing to this achievement, ANS-104 standard stipulates the Bundle standard, which enables the network to process different types of data such as transactions, transfers, and data uploads in a more flexible and powerful way. Without the Bundle standard, the entire network may only have half of the current transaction volume and get twice the result with half the effort. Arweave now allows users to complete historical tasks at a cost of 50% less.

Bundlr and Arseeding were among the leaders, with Bundlr reaching a new peak of 5.9 million transactions per day, while Arseeding continues to collaborate with tools such as KNN3, Adot, and 4everland to build better developer services.

Arweave's goal is to provide a reliable, secure and permanent storage solution that enables users to keep important data on the network and ensure that it is never lost or tampered with.

With Arweave, users can permanently store various types of data on the web, such as documents, audio, video, pictures, and more. Compared to traditional cloud storage solutions, Arweave offers greater reliability and security because the data is stored in a distributed blockchain network and cannot be tampered with or deleted.

This is essentially different from existing storage projects, whether traditional centralised, cloud storage vendors, or competitors in the Web3 space, any file uploaded to Arweave can be stored securely for at least 200 years.

But that's just what Arweave is commonly remembered for, and the next step will be to move from "cold storage" to "hot computing," where data will gain more vitality and economic value.

Before we do that, let's trace the source of Arweave's progress:

The past is gone

The usage of Arweave has been bleak for a long time, and the value of permanent storage has not been widely accepted and recognised by the market. The development of Arweave can be divided into three stages:

Before August 2021, Arweave was only one of the decentralised storage track projects, and although it received large funding, the overall ecology and project did not really grow;

August 2021-August 2022, the first small spike in usage, during which Bundlr began to promote network usage, the earliest code submission record dating back to July 4, 2021; From August 2022 to the present, the Arweave network has witnessed explosive growth, and most notably, this has been achieved against the backdrop of a bear market, in which the version 2.6 upgrade, which took effect in March 2023, allows mechanical hard drives to participate in mining, lowering the barrier to access to the network.

Arweave 2.6 focuses on two areas. First, reducing the energy consumption of Arweave stored data to improve the efficiency of the storage market. The second is to incentivise miners to store more data, especially rare data backup and data types with heavy space requirements such as audio and video.

Specifically, the following four specific measures will be included:

• Reduce the average cost of Arweave storage by encouraging miners to use cheaper hard drives to store data instead of continuing to increase transfer speeds;

• Create faster indexing of information by incentivising miners to back up more full copies of Arweave's mainnet data for a more "distributed" data backup network;

• Allow more mining computing power to be put into really useful data types to reduce energy waste in the network and avoid excessive spam in exchange for AR tokens;

• Allows storage costs to be estimated at dynamic prices in the Arweave network, leading miners to higher-value data type storage and improving network fault tolerance.

As it turns out, all these efforts have paid off, and the Arweave network is being chosen by more projects as their own data storage solution. The most typical of these is the Lens Protocol, which migrates data to the Arweave network.

In addition to this, Arweave's ecological infrastructure is no longer barren, everVision has built the universal payment protocol everPay, and the 0 Gas Fee DEX Permaswap based on the SCP paradigm. It relies on off-chain computing + on-chain settlement to achieve the same trading speed as traditional centralised exchanges, UniswapX's idea is highly similar.

Arweave's next goal can only be to serve the next billion users, moving away from internal volume and into a more mainstream market space.

Looking to the future

Arweave has entered the era of large-scale application, the next step of blockchain will not be limited to the field of simple financial transactions - a broader scenario requires more complex infrastructure to carry.

As mentioned above, simple cold storage needs to change, and more complex hot computing will become the main melody, whether it is Permaweb (permanent Network), or general database DB3, as well as the whole process of communication encryption layer Mind Network, are new network service applications.

It is also with the help of rich ecological Dapps that the Arweave network has gradually grown into a towering tree, and the next step will focus on continuing to lower the barrier of participation:

1. Lower barriers for participation : Arweave will continue to be simple to use, users do not need to install the Arweave main network. Just purchase a certain number of AR tokens at everPay to participate in transactions, storage and development. Compared to the traditional Internet, Arweave will remove the barrier to participation and attract more ordinary users and traditional users to participate.

2. Update the reward system : Arweave has revolutionised the mining mechanism to incentivise users to participate in transactions. Users can now use $U to earn AR tokens by storing and transferring data, both directly interacting with the Arweave network and using light nodes such as ArWEAVE, all of which are directly returned to end users.

3. Engage the community : Arweave has several active communities, such as PermaDAO hosting the Arweave Summer Asian Hackathon to encourage developers to participate and use Arweave. In addition, Community Labs is actively developing the low threshold wallet toolkit and sharing it with the community;

4. Development of the App Ecosystem : Arweave's app ecosystem is also growing and expanding, covering a wide range of sectors and industries. Mind Network, for example, has introduced a zero-trust mechanism into Arweave, decoupling data storage and computing, and taking full advantage of Arweave's cold storage features.

The second is to fuel the continued prosperity of the creator economy, truly freeing individuals from the profit deprivation and censorship of traditional centralised institutions, and giving free will back to everyone. For example, UDL (Unified Data Protocol) will provide Web3 content creators with an effective on-chain standard for content distribution, incentive setting, and permission management, so that creators can become the real subject of content creation, and disperse the platform advantages of centralised organisations to each individual.

Of course, the development of Arweave is not perfect, but as an "Old School" project through the two bull and bear cycles, Arweave still maintains enough innovative capabilities. We firmly believe that the Arweave network will become the foundation of the entire future of the world, shining on civilisation like the Library of Alexandria.

The whole universe will shine for you!

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