Arweave: Permaweb Ecosystem Expansion

Knowledge is power and the key to obtaining an asymmetrical advantage in society. Thanks to the web, information has been democratized and made accessible to anyone around the world with access to a mobile phone or computer. The rapid democratization of information – and ability for anyone to share information – has also empowered a wide variety of individuals including artists, developers, and everyday citizens. While the creation of the web started as a platform to communicate and share information freely, this is no longer the case.

At the internet’s current stage, freedom of information is being threatened. The original ethos of the web as a platform to communicate freely is diminishing as countries and large social media corporations censor information, create walled gardens, and prohibit access to certain content.

To combat this trend, Arweave has emerged to create a platform for immutable, verifiable, and truly censorship-resistant storage of information. Arweave serves as a collectively owned hard drive that permanently stores valuable information, apps, and history. Arweave aims to achieve this with a ‘pay once, store forever’ data storage model based on Moore's law. In addition to Arweave’s data storage Layer-1, developers are able to build Layer-2 decentralized apps which have developed into an ecosystem known as the permaweb, where all the content is permanent and decentralized.

Network Growth

Arweave has experienced tremendous growth over the past few months. On October 16, 2021, the Blockweave – Arweave’s blockchain-like structure designed to enable scalable on-chain storage in an efficient manner – reached a new milestone of 20TB (terabytes) of total data stored on the permaweb. To give an idea of how fast the Weave is growing, the first 10TB of on-chain storage took 1,139 days to accumulate while the next 10TB took only 87 days.

On-chain transactions have also experienced a significant uptick, beginning around the same time the Weave size started its rapid growth rate. One of the reasons for this increased transaction growth in the recent months can be traced back to a newly released bundle spec which significantly increases throughput on Arweave by bundling transactions.