The AO Computer: Spawning an Agent Economy

Today’s dominant smart contract platforms rely on proof of stake consensus mechanisms to verify a collective shared state within their networks. This architecture requires users to initiate transactions to interact with smart contracts and pay a transaction fee to gain priority in accessing state. Generally, these transactions are then bundled together and embedded into blocks, where node operators can all evaluate the validity of state. Rollups rely on sequencers to order and relay state changes and publish them to Ethereum mainnet. While Ethereum hits its limits as a global computing platform through transaction fees and time to finality, Solana hits limits within its actual hardware itself, where state bloat leads to a requirement for more performant machines with greater storage as the network continues to push boundaries. Although transactions can occur on multiple threads, the final state is submitted through one compute environment to a global shared state. 

Arweave’s AO computer conveys the same vision for a decentralized global computing platform as Ethereum, but implements several different choices in its architecture that radically differentiates it from L1 networks seen today. In doing so, the AO computer opens up the possibility for a hyper-scalable decentralized computing platform that can read, write, and edit data and process smart contract interactions with essentially zero barriers to participation, regardless of hardware parameters, infrastructure, or coding languages. This possibility enables a limitless sandbox that marries the capabilities of Web2 and Web3 in an easy to use package that could be primed for mass adoption. It is important to note that the AO computer is not a blockchain network itself, but rather a messaging layer that coordinates both blockchain and Web2 interactions at scale. 

An Arweave Refresh

Arweave is a decentralized network of hardware that enables users to permanently store data on the “Permaweb” for a one-time fee. Arweave relies on a distributed database, called “The Blockweave”, which is a slightly modified version of a blockchain. Each new block is connected with a prior block and a “recall block,” which is a random block from some historical point in the chain. Arweave’s Proof of Access mechanism requires a miner of a new block to prove that they have the entirety of a recall block stored as well, incentivizing miners to store data from old blocks in order to earn new block rewards. The fewer miners that store a certain block, the greater the incentive for a miner to store it, as there is less competition when that block is chosen as a recall block. For a more in depth look at Arweave, be sure to read our report. 

The AO Advantage

The AO computer serves as a global, decentralized computing platform that boasts theoretically limitless scalability and storage. Agnostic to native blockchain networks or payment methods, its modular design enables users and applications from any smart contract framework to seamlessly integrate with AO. The autonomy of AO’s processes and modules requires little human intervention to operate in perpetuity. Since developers can continue to spin up processes on their local machines as demand grows, the AO computer surpasses previous limitations on predominantly physically constrained systems. The utilization of Arweave as a censorship-resistant storage layer ties the entire software package together as a single, streamlined platform primed for the daily workload of the global Internet. 

AO Architecture