Arweave: Secure Online Data Storage with Blockchain

Traditional data storages go with obvious problems: automatic deletion of files once the storing period has expired, high fees, and vulnerability. More importantly, they are affected by the troubling tendency of today’s governments cracking down on the freedom of the internet. Censorship is becoming ever more of an issue for the contemporary Web.

The team of the Arweave project proposes blockchain as a solution for these problems. They are building their own protocol and distributed ledger, blockweave, to make data cost-efficient, permanent, and free from censorship. The Arweave ecosystem has its own API to allow programmers to develop dApps on it.

Attempting to be a core of the decentralized Internet

Arweave’s ambition is to be a “new backbone of the decentralized Internet”. To achieve that, they are developing their own data storage blockchain protocol (Arweave protocol), new cost-efficient distributed ledger (the blockweave), and self-organizing network. By using the blockweave, Arweave promises to provide high throughput of transactions. Developers are enabled to build applications on their platform.

AR Token use

Developers are the key user type on Arweave. The Arweave REST API allows them to build various applications that use resources and data from the network. Native tokens will be used as a payment currency by dApp developers for working with the platform. The proceeds will cover the Arweave maintenance, mining, and fight against spam.

Arweave feature set

Raw data journal
Arweave is building an open access journal in collaboration with Charite, the famous university hospital in Berlin which is known as one of the largest of its kind in Europe.

Securing online data with archive
A permanent and immutable Internet archive is one of the focal features with Arweave. They promise this to be a tool to curb possible Internet censorship attempts and prevent losing data by accident.

A safe place to keep legal documents
Arweave will provide the opportunity to store legal documents safely on a permanent basis.

Blockchain democracy
A long-awaited use of blockchain, the voting system based on it is planned to be part of the Arweave platform. They promise to cryptographically entangle every vote to prevent electoral fraud.

REST API
The Arweave REST API has already been launched to enable developers with building their own projects based on Arweave.

Competition
As long as Arweave is building their own protocol and ledger, they seem to enter the competition against the giants, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. As the Arweave whitepaper states, the immutable permanent storage they aim at building is similar to that provided by Ethereum. Comfortable fees are thought to be the key competitive advantage of Arweave against Ethereum where it is very expensive to store data.

The project team sees primarily focusing on storage as a way to enhance performance and provide high transaction throughput. According to the Arweave whitepaper, most of the similar platforms fail at this because of focusing on improving consensus algorithms between nodes instead.

There is one more competitor to Arweave, Filecoin. They also focus on the storage feature while providing flexible pricing. They completed their ICO successfully in September last year, having raised over $205M in USD, ETH, BTC, and ZEC. Since then, they have been working on the technical implementation.

AR token sale summary

Application to join the whitelist are closed now. Details of the AR token sale are yet to be announced.

Conclusion
Arweave is a very ambitious project trying to create a new generation blockchain protocol — the blockweave, as they call it. The project team is lead by PhD candidates in the relevant fields and is supported by the advisory board comprised of eight experts. If they succeed, Arweave can become a new milestone for the blockchain technology making it more available.

The project has been worked on since May 2017 and has already established a partnership with Charite, the famous university hospital in Berlin, and launched their REST API allowing developers to build Arweave apps. Given that, they create a positive impression and we certainly recommend watching Arweave.

Links:
Website: https://www.arweave.org/
Lightpaper: https://www.arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/arweave
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArweaveTeam
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArweaveTeam/
Author: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=980049

Disclaimer:
This review by Bonanza Kreep is all opinion and analysis, not investment advice.