ArWeave - The blockchain for storage written in stone

What if you can archive your data online by just paying once and store it online forever. This is the vision of the Arweave team. They are building a new blockchain network powering low cost immutable data storage with high throughput.

Arweave will be using their own blockchain called the blockweave which is a revolutionary distributed ledger technology. In their own words “blockweave is a platform designed to provide scalable on-chain storage in a cost-efficient manner for the very first time”. The blockweave allow the nodes to operate without having the whole chain. When miners join the Arweave network, they can immediately start by downloading the current block without verifying the entire weave themselves. As the amount of data stored in the system increases, the amount of hashing needed for consensus decreases, thus reducing the cost to store data.

Arweave works on the Proof of Access (PoA) consensus mechanism whereby miners compete to provide as many replications of the data held in the system as they can. Another innovation of Arweave is the “wildfire”. It is a mechanism that encourages miners to share data freely, they work on the principle of “if you share with me, I will share with you”. It incentivise miners for providing high speed distribution and low latency.

The final core technology for Arweave is the blockshadows. This is a fast and flexible block distribution system that works by having the nodes send a minimal block “shadow” that allows peers to reconstruct the whole block. The shadow contains hash which is around few kilobytes can be send quickly instead of sending the whole block.

The blockweave have a theoretical high transaction rate of around 5000 TPS on a 100mbps network. As a comparison, bitcoin is at 7-10 TPS, and ethereum around 25 TPS.

There are many other online storage providers in the market, for centralised ones we have Dropbox, Google drive and Microsoft One Drive. All this works on a subscription model where you have to pay the vendor to continue using the storage space. For other decentralised model like Storaj, SIA or filecoin, their data is not stored on the blockchain but the data is stored on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and the data is subject to changes. Arweave is the only blockchain that stores the storage on the blockchain.

The Arweave team is targeting few focus application namely :
1. Journal of raw data - to store the massive amount of data online safely and economically. They already partnered with Charite, one of the largest hospital in Europe to build a brand new scientific journal.

2. Permanent internet archive – by creating a snapshot or storing the internet webpage at various points in time, the data integrity is preserved and backup. This prevents government censorship or modification of the webpage.

3. Legal document storage – legal files can be encrypted and stored permanently on the blockchain allowing easier access to data. The data is immutable and can be verifiable on the blockchain. Access to the data can be archived through encryption and key management.

4. Verifiable democracy – Government can use Arweave to store electoral lists, election data and if needed store every vote casts. By having every vote in the election cryptographically entangled with every other vote in every other election, ensuring no party or individual can ever subvert the election results.

5. REST API – Developers can already start to use Arweave API to integrate their projects to use the Arweave storage system. The system will only charge to writing data to the blockchain while reading of data is free.

Malaysia recently conducted it’s 14 general election in early May. The previous ruling government which holds the record of having the longest continuously ruling government was defeated after a 61 year rule. There were claims about electoral roll irregularity and delayed election result. If the election commision could use Arweave to store the election result or even electoral roll, many of this problem could be solve.

For one, it’s immutable nobody can change or censor it. It’s fair as all the party involve can view and check it and it’s economical, you only need to pay once to store it. It’s not vulnerable to single point of storage failure as it is decentralised and the data distributed across the nodes.

courtesy of the Malay Mail - https://www.malaymail.com/s/1628953/at-kedah-polling-station-hundreds-of-voters-greet-dr-m-wife

https://aliran.com/coalitions/clean-and-fair-elections/10-major-irregularities-in-electoral-roll-electoral-commissions-incompetence-or-fraud/
http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2018/05/09/we-won-but-ec-delaying-results-says-mahathir/

Another unique selling point for Arweave is that not only do they a MVP, their mainnet is set to launched on 8th June. No longer do you have to wait for months like other ICO for their product to be released. The team is from University of Nottingham which consists of PhD researchers and scientist that specialise in decentralised storage and computer technology.

Although the whitelist for the sale of the ICO is closed since 18 May, you can still get updates about the project on their telegram (currently with 30K member) and website.

The ICO has a very low market cap of around USD $8.7 million , the allocation for public sale is only USD $675K (500K British Pound).
Website https://www.Arweave.org
Telegram : https://t.me/Arweave
Medium : https://medium.com/@Arweave
Github : https://github.com/ArweaveTeam/Arweave
Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdM3INQ5NAsNjWU8-2y_xjw