About

Arweave is a decentralized network that offers permanent data storage and hosting services. Similar to Bitcoin, it operates on an open ledger system. The protocol is stable, mature, and widely adopted, making the ecosystem fully decentralized. Arweave is used for preserving important data, hosting web apps, and offers various opportunities for learning, using, and building on the platform.

History

Founded in 2017 as Archain, the company changed its name to Arweave in 2018 while completing the Techstars Berlin mentorship program. Arweave's mission is to make permanent, low-cost storage a reality. The company aims to accomplish its goal with the Arweave network, a block-based data structure called a “blockweave”.

Arweave’s blockweave underpins the Arweave permaweb, an array of data, websites, and applications that are hosted on the blockweave. Since the Arweave protocol is built on top of the HTTP protocol, the permaweb is accessible via modern web browsers like Brave or Google Chrome. Aiming to store data on the network in perpetuity, the Arweave protocol enables individuals with spare hard drive space to store data in exchange for AR tokens. Arweave anticipates that the cost of storage will continue to decrease and uses a formula to calculate how much it will cost to store a particular piece of data. All of Arweave’s assumptions can be found in its yellowpaper.

The Arweave mainnet launched in June of 2018 with a select group of 1800 hand-picked participants across various countries. Before the launch, the Arweave team also conducted an initial token sale limited to whitelisted individuals.

In November of 2019, Arweave secured a $5 million funding round from several venture capital firms in exchange for $5 in Arweave tokens. Six months later, the Arweave team raised another $8.3 million in exchange for AR tokens. However, after this round, the firm stated that it would use the new funds to incentivize community adoption and growth.