ARWEAVE: A Decentralized Storage System

miracle24 (39)in #ico • 6 years ago (edited)

Introduction

In this current information age where internet is part of our everyday life, it has helped us to communicate freely with one another. Since the internet has been where we interact, conduct business and share a lot of files and documents, people often fall for it that whatever that has been stored on the internet can never be lost or altered. This is not true has there has been reported cases of data theft etc. as the power of the internet grows, it became an avenue where peoples’ activities can be controlled, monitored and censored.

To protect our online data from censorship and third party interference, there is a need for a blockchain data storage protocol which is censorship free and truly decentralized.

One of the advantages that blockchain technology brings to the modern data storage is the decentralized nature. There are lots of them already in the market like FileCoin, SiaCoin, Maid and Storj. However, with this effort by various companies, decentralized storage is yet to see a major adoption and use.

I present to you Arweave, which presents a decentralized file storage solution.

Arweave

Arweave formally known as Archain is a decentralized file storage solution which uses a novel consensus mechanism. This allows for a fast transaction and encourages long term data storage.

The Arweave blockchain is highly scalable with transactions up to 5000 per second (5000 TPS) and storage cost lesser compare to similar projects which is ideal to be the backbone of the data storage economy. On Arweave’s decentralized storage medium, data are stored permanently.

Technology

Arweave’s confidence in providing a higher throughput, persistency of data, and incentivizing participants in the network to share and store as much data as possible is achieved via these technologies;

Blockweave

This is the main structure behind Arweave that allows for a scalable on-chain storage and at a much reduced fee. A processing node can jump on the network right away, and only requires a single hash of the entire ledger instead of all of it as the case with other networks. As the amount of hashing needed for consensus reduces, the amount of data stored in the system increases. With this, Arweave increases TPS many times and lower storage long term cost drastically while users get the ability of paying a one-time fee for a long term storage.

Proof of Access

Proof of access algorithm chose and incorporates data from the previous block randomly. This requires a node to have a recall block so as to mint the next block. A reward is issued to the node storing the recall block when the next block is minted. This serves as incentives to the nodes so as individuals can store as many blocks as they want. This conserves storage space.

Wildfire

This is Arweaves self-sustaining topology which incentivize miners to share data with one another. Miners positive reputation is built and increased by how fast data is shared and stored with other network miners. Blockweave network needs a fast access data to carry out its mining duties in the proper way, miners are incentivized to share data with other miners so that this can be done quickly and continuously which in turn increases the sharing experience among miners.

Blockshadows

This is another great feature of Arweaves effectiveness. Only hashes are sent out to other networks instead of transmitting a full blocks of transactions and this is used by other nodes to reconstruct the block. This is based on information that have been stored already. This also allows for faster transaction of 5000 TPS.

Use Cases

Arweave has come to revamp decentralized data storage on blockchain with its unique proof of access consensus mechanism. Looking at the technologies already built and the ones to come cause the team promises to constantly develop the network.
Here are the use cases of Arweave;

Decentralized data storage
Decentralized data sharing
Decentralized data collaboration
Decentralized data Identity/Protection

Token

AR will be the official token of the Arweave network which will be on the Blockweave platform. It will be the native token as they will have their own wallet and blockchain. Mainnet is set to go live on 8th of June, 2018.