Bundlr and Arweave in Problem Solving Mode
Data indexing to enhance how information is discovered on Arweave and time-limited storage have been identified by guests on Bundlr Network’s latest bi-weekly Twitter space as a significant challenge the Arweave ecosystem should strive to solve.
Archived data on Arweave’s decentralized storage system is fast growing in size. For example, data on the Russian-Ukraine war alone is over 50 million, and players in the NFT subsector of digital assets are increasingly adopting Arweave for permanent storage. This makes it essential for archived data to be effectively tagged or indexed to aid easy discovery and usability by people.
Currently, Arweave’s system allows only the uploader of data to index or label the data. Sam Sends, co-founder of Glass Protocol, and David Phelps, writer and investor, suggested that Bundlr and the Arweave ecosystem should explore innovations that index archived data.
“So if I am submitting a video, I could say that it’s a glass video and this is the creator but other people are not able to label that data. I think allowing other people to label that data becomes really interesting because you start building this graph of different labels that you can search in decentralised fashion”, Sends said.
Josh Benaron, the founder of Bundlr, noted that indexing data was not difficult to solve technologically as centralized platforms as Google had already done it. Still, he said that doing it in a decentralized manner might be a challenge but is eager to see who will solve the indexing challenge.
“Indexing will have to start exponentially with the entire network… From a software standpoint, it is doable, it’s just a matter of if we can do it in a decentralised way”, Benaron said responding to Sends.
Also, Phelps said he would like to see a feature on Arweave that provides an option for time-limited data that automatically allows archived data to delete after the set time.
“Is there a use case for temporary data as well You have data that only lasts about an hour and it’s going to be rewritten so it does not really matter and you don’t want it archived forever.”
Although Phlep’s idea directly conflicts with Arweave’s objectives, including immutability of data and long-term storage, Benaron agrees that there are use cases for time-limited data storage, such as Web3 gaming companies that constantly use cases update data.
“What you can do with something like Bundlr is you can have an immutable record of every change made to a bit of content. And that is my criticism of immutability as obviously things can be changed in the past but if you have this immutable versioning of contents then it’s a perfect middle ground for NFTs and the gaming space”, Benaron said.
Benaron disclosed that Bundlr was working on incentivized archiving in the short term, where people support archiving projects and get minted NFTs proportional to the token they put in a funding pool. The founder said this would be followed by incentivized truthful reporting, which can be done when there is a repository of information. Although Bundlr has raised $5.2 million seed rounds, its founder said the incentivized archiving project would not be immediately built for reasons he did not mention.
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