Arweave is the DAVID out to Slay the GOLIATHS of the Blockchain Storage
Once in a Blue Moon, an opportunity comes along where a small company goes against the Giants of the Industry. And triumphs. The odds are heavily stacked against this small minnow. But through innovation, persistence, an app that spread likes wildfire, David does indeed bring down the Goliath of the Industry. And just like in Biblical times, Goliath does not know what hit him — it was an INNOVATION made out of the simplest of materials. And I think the key here is INNOVATION. And approach which is different from the status quo, and which lights a spark that catches like wildfire and becomes viral in and of itself. This is where small upstarts can then threaten larger, entrenched players.
The giants of the storage Apps (centralized and de-centralised) are GOOGLE DRIVE, DROPBOX and MICROSOFT. In the Cryptocurrency universe, names such FILECOIN, SIA and STORJ come to mind. But even in the Cryptocurrency world there are giants, and they are huge. Filecoins ICO US$257 million in 2017, shows the appetite for Storage (it is quite obvious that the architecture of blockchain itself would require huge amounts of fast storage) is huge, and this followed the trend of the Internet in the 1990s and early 2000s, were Storage companies like EMC, NetApps, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM ruled the roost. Their stock prices appreciated manyfold and even exceeded their Network, Servers and Database counterparts. EMC, for example, was the best performing stock on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the 1990s.
The flood of Data is real.. This is Big Data and not your usual relational (formatted data) in your Databases. And as more and more applications are rolled out, with new applications such as Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IOT), the emergence of many Champions will happen even in the Blockchain world. And since the amount of data is voluminous, there must be way to store on the cheap, a model of PAY ONCE, STORE FOREVER. The trilemma of “Cost of Content”, “Permanent Data Storage” and “Performance (Speed/Costs)” need to be resolved.
Enter a start-up called ARWEAVE. A part of the TechStars family, it is a company which is in the middle of a revolution of Storage on the Blockchain, and being part of a leading Accelerator community ensures a strong basis for a quantum leap. As the giants of the Storage industry fight each other, jostling for position, then along comes the minnow, the David who is out to slay the mighty Goliath. And with a hardcap of US$8.5 million for its ICO (Initial Coin Offering, it is indeed the David of this industry. With a model of paying ONCE for storage which can be part of the blockchain forever, one must begin to wonder where the innovation will come from and whether Arweave is up to the job or not.
And herein lies the difference. Arweave will have SOMETHING WORKING BY THEIR ICO! That’s an HONEST TO GOD approach. A new innovative Blockchain called the Blockweave will be able to deliver 5,000 TPS (Transactions per second) by June 8th. Such an idea could not have come at a more opportune time. The costs to store 1MB on the Ethereum Blockchain is estimated to be US$13,000 and this alone will take 18 minutes!! Paying through one’s noses for storage times which are an eternity is not about to make Blockchain a darling of Enterprises very soon. But Blockweave from Arweave will now change the entire narrative. Blockweave is a new Distributed Ledger technology with a new consensus mechanism called “Proof of Access” which produces permanent Scaleable on-chain storage for the without the need for high energy consumption required by “Proof of Work”. And it works on a Serverless Architecture model.
And low cost archiving storage is sorely needed, with COSTS being the largest barrier now. Arweave will mount a significant challenge to the giants of the industry because:
1. It already has an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) running at 5,000 TPS and you will see this during the ICO on June 8
2. Part of the Techstars ecosystem, and this would also include access to traditional funding
3. Innovative architecture consisting of (a) Blockweave: Solution for scalable on-chain storage in a cost-efficient manner. The Cost of storing data is drastically reduced by reducing hashing for Consensus, which goes down as Storage volume increase (b) Proof of Access: Arweave uses Proof of Access and Proof of Work as consensus mechanism so miners only need to store previous blocks being created, instead of creating a storage block and stacking it above the old blocks © Through Wildfire miners are incentivized to share data and collaborate with each other — yes there are REWARDS but the incentivisation is correct. This will save massive amounts of electricity associated with Centralised Mining and Storage pools (d) Blockshadows: To increase throughout (it will launch a Miannet at 5,000 TPS in June) Arweave does not move entire blocks by only minimal block “shadows” — this decouples transactions from block and allow post reconstruction of a full block.
With this approach, Arweave is addressing the critical storage space markets head on — balancing challenges such as Centralisation, Censorsip, Monitoring and Unlimined data storage which are really owned by users (instead of being constantly snooped on by “Centralised authorities” be they Governments, large Social Media organisations such as Facebook, or what not).
And it does this by combining four technologies which operate together to create a highly scalable 5,000 TPS permanent storage. And best of all, Arweave already has WORKING MVP. And it achieves this Decentralisated Ecosystem using a consensus mechanism based on the proof of access (PoA) and proof of work (PoW) systems. Not only this, but Arweave also ENCOURAGES COLLABORATION to maintain a single copy of the weave by storing rare blocks. But as centralized Storage becomes limited (everything has a finite limitation), miners who have copies of rare blocks will receive rewards should rare blocks be recalled in the future.
We have seen how large Mining pools (and soon Storage pools0 have come to dominate this space, but Arweave now give small miners a space to participate. This has since become the trend, to give POWER BACK TO THE SMALL GUY in the Decentraised world and you even see this in other ICOs such as Quarkchain.
Arweave’s strength really is in the youth and academic levels of its TEAM. And it is a humble team. Rather than working hard on creating breakthrough technology which is “bleeding edge”, Arweave’s approach is to STAND ON THE SHOULDERS of GIANTS, stating in the whitepaper that they indeed are “solving at specific shortcomings of blockchain networks, namely storage, and along the way a novel approach to transaction speeds.” And this is the correct approach. Co-founders Sam Williams and William Jones are both PhD candidates which sets a ‘Spark’ for innovative ideas. And they do use the Ecosystem to their advantage! Arweaves also WALKS THE TALK. Being based out Berlin, they are already deploying a solution to Charite, one the largest universities in Europe, to create an open access scientific journal. It has a strong team of Advisors who have REAL Cryptocurrency experience (with Quantstamp and IOTA, for example).
With the Dropbox ICO raising US$756 million and giving what was a small San Francisco Y-Combinator Startup a market valuation of US$10 billion, the future for Storage companies in the Cryptocurrency space are as bright as ever, following the same trends seen in the Internet boom of the 1990s and also the Social Media explosion.
GOLIATH be aware…Arweave just might come and bring you down!