Arweave (ICO review)
A blockchain designed to provide scalable on-chain storage in a cost-efficient way
Background
Arweave is a blockchain protocol designed for data storage with a combination of proof of work (PoW) and proof of access (PoA) consensus mechanisms. The shortcoming of centralized storage systems has become particularly apparent in recent years, with data hacking and altercations. The Arweave blockchain is designed to facilitate permanent, low-cost on-chain storage to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding industry.
One of key success of Arweave is, it already has a running testnet (launched more than 7 months before), and the mainnet is within 2 weeks (just around the crowdsale dates). Therefore, we can easily assume that decentralised applications (dapps) could be built on Arweave blockchain as soon as the crowdsale is completed. This is clearly an advantage compared to many ICOs or even recently launched ICOs as many of them usually wait longer than a year to launch mainnet.
Fig. 1 illustrates the main architecture of Arweave blockchain. As it says, Arweave can achieve 5000 tps, which is more than many of top blockchains can achieve currently.
Main features of Arweave
Arweave blockchain is built on four core technologies that work together to create low cost, high throughput and permanent storage on a new blockchain. These four technologies are briefly discussed in here.
Blockweave
The existing blockchains store every transaction to achieve validation whereas the blockweave permits secure decentralization without the usage of the entire chain. This improves levels of scalability, speed and low-cost. Using its block hashpower and wallet lists, Blockweave verifies transactions without engaging the last transaction’s block. This creates a scalable and affordable system with costs decreasing with the addition of data, opposite to what existing blockchains offer.
Proof of Access
Arweave consensus mechanism is based on Proof of Access (PoA) and Proof of Work (PoW). Unlike the PoW, the PoA algorithm incorporates data from a randomly chosen previous block. Combined with the blockweave data structure, miners do not need store all blocks (this is what existing blockchains do), but rather can store any previous blocks, incentivised by PoA and Wildfire, forming a weave of blocks, a blockweave.
Wildfire
Existing decentralized storage networks have struggled to incentivise rapid data sharing. Some blockchain relies on a PoW consensus where blocks can take hours to confirm, resulting in unreasonably late transactions. Arweave has designed Wildfire to tackle this issue and achieve high transaction speeds.
Blockshadows
Blockshadows facilitates secure decentralization, fast block consensus and high-throughput. In Arweave, instead of broadcasting a full block during a transaction, blockshadowing transmits a shadow that is reconstructed by recipient nodes. Instead of containing a list of transactions inside a block, a blockshadow holds only a list of transaction hashes. Using this variant, any node that holds the full list of transactions, wallet and hash lists can reproduce the full block. Read the whitepaper for more details.
The team and advisory board
Mr. Sam Williams and Mr. William Jones are co-founders and have vast experience in decentralised system system. Fig. 2 illustrates the core team and Fig. 3 lists the advisory board. The development team has vast experience in academic background, which is really good for a new technology like blockchain. The advisory board is full of people from many different disciplines such as Anthony Ryan, from Quanstamp, a very successful blockchain project and from various business backgrounds. Since the whole decentralised applications are yet to see mass adoption, it is really necessary to get people already in the business background. In that sense, I really like the whole team of Arweave. The project is also supported by a number of existing companies as illustrated in Fig. 4 which generally suggests the technology of Arweave is accepted by real businesses.
Practical applications
Arweave not only solves issues with cryptography and decentralized architecture, it also provides a platform for building decentralized apps (dApps). Various decentralized applications such as data storage, data sharing, data collaboration, data Identity, etc. can be built on Arweave blockchain. Fig. 5 illustrates some of real world applications.
Token matrics and crowdsale
There will be ever be maximum of 66m AR tokens, but the initial circulating supply will be much less due to some tokens are generated through mining. 20.6% of the total tokens (13.6m) will be offered through the token sale. The project is going to collect less than $9m for the developments of the project through the ICO. It should be worth noticing though, only less than $1m is allocated to the public sale (supposed to come within next 2 weeks).
When you look the existing decentralised platforms on data storage, such as Siacoin ($3.5b at the previous ATH), Maidsafecoin ($500m), Storj ($400m) and Filecoin (collected $250m at the ICO), you can probably understand the demand for decentralised data storage and the potential of Arweave. It is also worth reminding that given Arweave’s unique technology of permanent storage and the mainnet coming alone the crowdsale (scheduled to be on 8 June 2018), Arweave could be a huge success even in short-term time frame as Dapps can be build on Arweave platfrom as soon as the mainnet is launched.
Final verdict
Data storage has a huge demand in decentralised world due to various problems in the existing decentralised systems. The concept of Arweave is unique compared to the existing decentralised platforms trying to solve storage problems.
The token matrics and hype (almost 30k in the telegram) behind the project suggest there will be huge success in short- to medium-term time frames. It is also worth mentioning that Arweave was recently appeared on the CNBC Crypto Trader (watch from 39.10–39.40). As data storage has a huge role in decentralised applications, the long-term success will always be guaranteed if the team is able to achieve what they proposed. The team seem quite capable of achieving the goals. Therefore, I believe this project will be a very successful blockchain on data storage both in short- and long-term time frames.
Website: https://arweave.org/
Telegram group: https://t.me/arweave
Disclaimer
ICOs are too risky and you could lose all of your money if you invest in crappy scam projects. Thus, always do due diligence on every projects you are going to invest, and take responsibility for your own decisions. The information given here is merely my opinions and data could be slightly different as collected from various sources.