Arweave: 82% |
Review Date: March 2nd, 2021
As they describe themselves, Arweave is a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to store data forever. Arweave aims to deliver a global, permanent hard drive on a new kind of blockchain with high throughput, decentralized, immutable, and with low-cost data storage. Arweave features a hybrid consensus mechanism, a mix of Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Access allowing miners to verify transactions and blocks quickly. As Arweave is building the core infrastructure allowing for the permaweb, the project aims to be community-driven and to enable the development of other protocols on top of it such as SmartWeave for example, a smart contract protocol powered by the Arweave network.
Arweave is interesting in the sense that it introduces a different approach to decentralized data storage than its competitor in the Blockchain space such as Filecoin, Storj or Sia for example that offers contract-based storage whereas Arweave aims to provide permanent storage. It is therefore not competing on cost with centralized data storage providers but is instead offering a new service that none of those giants can offer. The project is not a newcomer and has been in the works for more than 4 years now by a large team of engineers and researchers, some of them holding PhDs. In addition to that, the firm secured more than $13 million in different rounds of funding from giant VC firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, and Union Square Ventures.
