The Future of Arweave: AMA with Sam Williams
Arabic / Chinese / Japanese / Latvian / Russian
The first permanent, on-chain AMA opened questions to Arweave CEO and founder Sam Williams. The community showed interest in the future of Arweave as a protocol and as an ecosystem – how can Arweave change the internet, and how will it get there?
We’ll be running more AMAs with key figures in the ecosystem via permablog, where this AMA is also archived.
Q: Do you think the there’s a chance Arweave can surpass Ethereum in value and adoption in the future?
A: It’s not my place to speculate on prices. In general, though, I think that the value captured by the base layer of the decentralised web could be enormous.
Q: What is the plan for engaging more people and letting more people know about Arweave?
A: Through building a decentralised marketing infrastructure — including backing initiatives just like this! arweave.news now has an incredible full-time team working on producing interesting content around the permaweb ecosystem — and they are not alone. @OnlyArweave is also starting up a vehicle to focus on getting the word out and pushing Arweave adoption (more on this, soon). On top of that, as we on-board more founders and projects to the ecosystem, they too become heavy transmitters of the ‘meme’.
Q: What do you think of the storage computing paradigm? Could Arweave replace Ethereum?
A: It is pretty fascinating! It seems obvious that the key to smart contract scalability is about data availability — transaction execution is actually an easier and simpler game. @outprog from EverFinance was one of the first to realise this, and wrote it up into an incredible article. It is definitely worth a look.
Q: What do you think of Arweave’s future mass adoption scenarios
A: I think the game is to build a new, better web. A good-case outcome for us is to essentially become embedded as the shared knowledge layer of humanity, as well as the core application hosting platform. It’s early days and it is an exceptionally large goal, but if you had told us 4 years ago where we are today we would not have believed that was possible, either :).
Q: Going forward, do you foresee any major changes being made to the Arweave protocol itself, or is it considered ‘done’?
A: Interesting question! I think we are on the exponentially decaying curve of changes now. There are still things that we are tweaking, but the broad principles of the Arweave protocol are now locked in place and (mostly) battle-tested. I expect the core protocol changes to continue getting smaller over time. Much of the key ecosystem development nowadays is being led by the community in the protocols on top of Arweave core — work on SmartWeave, bundling, gateways, verified archivers, and much more, are all being spearheaded by the community itself.
Our next AMA guest will be Verto founder Tate Berenbaum – visit permablog to ask Tate anything and get rewarded in $ARN if your question is answered.
