Summary, History and Status of Arweave (AR) — 2024 Edition

Summary, History and Status of Arweave (AR) — 2024 Edition

Summary, History and Status of Arweave (AR) — 2024 Edition

…and how to make money on it in 2024?

Layer 1 Chains

·

35 min

Summary, History and Status of Arweave (AR) — 2024 Edition

…and how to make money on it in 2024?

Layer 1 Chains

·

35 min

Summary, History and Status of Arweave (AR) — 2024 Edition

…and how to make money on it in 2024?

Layer 1 Chains

·

35 min

Summary, History and Status of Arweave (AR) — 2024 Edition

…and how to make money on it in 2024?

Layer 1 Chains

·

35 min

TL;DR: With a new update or project being released almost every day, it’s clear the crypto ecosystem is constantly evolving. Arweave has gone through a lot of ups and downs to reach the level it’s at today — but it’s just the beginning. Knowing what brought it here and why it was created will lead you to make better decisions when investing or simply using Arweave.

In this article, we’re gonna dive into the Arweave ecosystem, answer all the $AR related questions and even more. Prepare yourself for a history lesson and a journey to the future of Arweave!

What is Arweave (AR)?

Arweave is a blockchain-like protocol for storing data in a decentralized way. Typical blockchains have problems with data storage. These problems require third-party protocols integrated on top of blockchains, as fees are always for on-chain storage to be feasible. With typical blockchains, there is always going to be a cost to access content, and content is never stored permanently.

Arweave comes to solve these shortcomings with its unique structure called blockweave. Similarly to regular blockchains, blockweave consists of a set of blocks that contain data, linking to previous blocks from the network.

A well known property of most blockchains is that every block must be stored to participate in validating transactions as a “full node”. This is not the case with Arweave. Instead of having each miner verify the entire blockchain from the genesis block to the current block, Arweave uses a system of “ongoing verification”.


When miners join the Arweave network, they will download the current block and retrieve all the data from the previous block. Since all data have been continuously verified through the ongoing progress of each block, new miners can start participating immediately without verifying the entire blockchain themselves.

Once the document is stored on Arweave, it is cryptographically linked with every other block on the network. This ensures that any attempt to change the contents of the document will be detected and rejected by the network. In this way, no subversion of the information on the blockchain is possible.

The blockweave is based on proof of access (PoA), a modified version of the proof of work consensus mechanisms. While typical PoW systems only depend on the previous block in order to generate the next block, the PoA algorithm incorporates data from a randomly chosen previous block. Within PoA, miners compete to provide as many replications of the data held in the system as they can.

But how do you ensure miners will continuously store the data on the network?

The challenge is similar to BitTorrent where peers would rely on people who already downloaded the files aka “seeds” to keep sharing the files to the network. While most seeds were acting in good faith, there was no guarantee that files would be permanently available to share. This challenge is solved with Arweave’s self-organizing system called “Wildfire”.

While complex under the hood, Wildfire can be summarized as: “if you share with me, I will share with you”. It is a system where miners are selfishly incentivized to store and share data as quickly as possible with other miners in the network, in order to build a positive reputation.

Arweave has been built with the vision of becoming the “Library of Alexandria” for the internet. The network is supposed to store all the data of the humanity for centuries and the team even coined the term permaweb. To put simply: permaweb looks just like the traditional web, except everything published on the permaweb is forever available to retrieve.


The most important aspect is that the permaweb is ran by people like you!

The traditional web is powered by servers, often owned by companies like Google or Amazon.  This means that a third party is responsible for managing the data of millions of people. The Permaweb uses a serverless structure that helps people make money from their spare hard drive space.

But how is a spare hardrive supposed to store all humanity’s data?

As of 2022, Google estimated that the size of all internet is 5 billion terabytes and it’s growing exponentially. Considering that the internet is roughly 50 years old, storing all this data over centuries would require tremendous storage capacity.

As perviously mentioned, Arweave uses a structure of blocks to store data. In order for the network to achieve its objective, the size of the blocks should be unlimited. To solve this challenge, Arweave came up with the concept of blockshadows.


As the name indicates, blockshadowing works by partially decoupling transactions from blocks, and only sending between nodes a minimal block “shadow” that allows peers to reconstruct a full block, instead of transmitting the full block itself.

This means that the information required to process large blocks can be distributed across the network in just a few kilobytes. It also means that blocks can be processed faster and consensus can be achieved nearly instantly. Right out of the gate, Arweave is able to process 5000 transactions per second while keeping the network fees low.

Arweave is powered by the AR token, a central part of the Arweave ecosystem. AR tokens used to pay for information to be permanently archived on the Arweave. These token payments are distributed as rewards to the ‘miners’ who choose to store and maintain the information on the Arweave. However, the majority of the fees miners receive are allocated to a storage endowment, which is distributed to the miners across time.

The endowment serves as an extra incentive for miners to keep data on their machines. If a certain file would become less popular, the endowment will distribute more rewards to miners who choose to store the file. The endowment adds another layer of security to the network and it also serves as a limit to AR’s volatility.


Arweave has a fixed maximum token supply of 66 million AR.

In June 2018, 55 million AR was minted with blockweave's genesis block, and an additional 11 million will be gradually introduced as block rewards.

As of October 2022, Arweave’s circulating supply is 33.39 million AR out of max supply of 63.19 million AR. The current yearly supply inflation rate is 0.00% meaning 1.00 AR were created in the last year.

Mining. however, is not the only way network participants like yourself can earn more Arweave. Read our Arweave Mining & Staking guide for exact steps and best methods to earn more crypto like $AR right from your home.

When was Arweave (AR) created?

Arweave was created by Sam Williams in 2017 during his academic journey at University of Nottingham. Sam and a slew of his colleagues started to work on the concept, which was initially named Archain. In the months to come, the small team managed to spin up an alpha testnet and finished the whitepaper. The team knew that in order to attract funding, they had to demonstrate the potential of Archain.

Building a decentralized storage is one thing, having millions of people build their services on top of it would be more challenging. So the team came up with the idea of Archain apps — an incentivized competition that would attract builders and help polish the protocol.

By the end of the year, Sam had a clear idea about the strong points of Archain and its shortcomings. The challenge was to be able to scale the network in order to create a strong database of information for people to access. It was time for them to showcase Archain to a wider audience.

In 2018, they went through the Techstars programme in Berlin where they recruited more team members. The journey lasted for three months and concluded with a demo presentation to the investors. At the end of the programme, the project had a marketing team and a board of experienced advisors to lead them forward.


It was then when Archain became Arweave.

The team was looking to differentiate their project from similarly named crypto projects (Rchain, Achain), and place the project’s unique blockweave technology at the heart of their proposition. The tokens used in the system would remain known as AR, and there was absolutely no change or impact to the tokenholders. The website went through a complete revamp and the project started to gain its own identity. The next step was to put Arweave on the map via a token sale.

Just months after the announcement, Arweave had raised $900K from its private token sale. Eventually, Arweave had raised $5M from notable venture capital firms including Coinbase, a16z, and Multicoin Capital.

Thousands of members were joining every day, and people were willing to invest in the idea of permaweb. 2018 was still the height of the ICO fever, with millions raised overnight from profit-hungry VCs. Although it was common for projects to raise their hard cap limit, Sam realized they don’t need more money and decided to set the hard cap at $8.6 million.

The second part of the token sale enabled retail investors to participate based on “proof of interest.” This decision proved to be crucial for the long-term health of the project. People that were truly committed to the project made it to the whitelist and continued to build on top of Arweave years after the hype dried out.


On July 13, 2018, Arweave’s mainnet happened.

By then, community members had created their own prototypes, and archivists had used Arweave to store vintage Soviet vintage magazines and newspapers that were thought to have been gone forever. In order to create a blockchain that can sustain ever growing amount of data stored, Arweave had to come up with a modified version of the blockchain.

Using Bitcoin’s proof of work consensus was unsustainable with its ridiculous energy usage and proof of stake wouldn’t work either. Instead, the team created their own blockchain-like structure called blockweave, which is based on the proof of access consensus mechanism.

However, with great amounts of data comes great requirements of storage. Blockweave would solve two major problems: on-chain storage constraints and unsustainable consensus mechanisms.


Arweave can theoretically store unlimited amounts of data in a block for the long-term using “shadowblocks.” The system decouples transaction distribution from that of block distribution in the network.  This allows only a ‘shadow’ of the block to be moved around the system (the instructions necessary to rebuild the block from its constituent transactions), rather than full block itself. This means that the information required to process large blocks can be distributed across the network in just a few kilobytes.

The second short coming of unsustainable consensus mechanism was solved with the introduction of proof of access. Instead of competing to burn as much electricity as possible, miners compete to provide as many replications of the data held in the system as they can. Further, as the blockweave expands in size, the amount of electricity expended in the mining process decreases. Compared to services like Filecoin, Siacoin or Storj, Arweave was capable of reaching 5000 TPS during its first iteration. This proved to be an important selling point for the company as they were pitching the service.

Another meaningful event for Arweave early on was the partnership with Shelf.Network, a universal auctioning infrastructure. Shelf Network utilizes Arweave’s massively-scalable blockweave data structure to store the auction listings, which wouldn’t be possible with a traditional blockchain.

In 2018, Arweave also collaborated with the biomedical scientists from Charité, one of the largest university hospitals in Europe. Together, they created “The Journal of Raw Data,” an online-only open access peer-reviewed biomedical data journal, utilizing the Arweave network for permanent data storage.

Who created Arweave (AR)?

Arweave was created by Sam Williams and his colleague William Jones in 2017.

Sam studied computer science at the University of Nottingham, UK, between 2011 and 2014 and started his career as a lecturer at the University of Kent. According to Sam, his first contact with peer-to-peer systems was in 2010 when he discovered BitTorrent. The network functioned on a simple premise: “I give you data if you give me data.”

In his opinion, BitTorrent was one of the first experiments with peer-to-peer design.

What amazed Sam was the fact that BitTorrent was responsible for 35% of the internet traffic, so there had to be more to the idea. This large orchestration of humans for peer-to-peer protocols was one of the first discoveries that would sway Sam towards studying distributed systems.

Later in 2011-2013, he found out about Bitcoin from a friend who was using the cryptocurrencies for drank net purchases. Bitcoin was trading at around 5 cents, and the fact that the cryptocurrency was mainly being used for illegal products didn’t make him pursue the whitepaper. After a few months, his friend called again saying that Bitcoin was trading above $1.


Sam asked himself how was it possible that the “internet magic money was trading above the value of the mighty dollar?” It was then when Sam started to take Bitcoin seriously. Sam and his later head of product at Arweave set up a mining rig in the university halls, using the building’s electricity to mine BTC.

The experiment proved to be short-lived, as they only mined about $20 of BTC, but it was a fun and interesting experience for the young students. Sam’s curiosity for Bitcoin faded for a few more years, but it had clearly shaped his interest in regards to the academic journey.

He started building distributed systems for his undergraduate degree. The idea of his thesis was to build a machine that could compute very large amounts of data in an adversarial system. Following the experiment, Sam received offers from universities to do his PhD.

The next stage of his thesis was to run such distributed systems and test the resilience of the network by gradually taking out RAM sticks from the machines. 3 years into the study, and the U.S. elections of 2016 were happening. Sam was becoming aware of the black swan events happening in democratic politics all over the western world.

Suddenly, it was starting to appear that serious might come to democratic societies because of the fake news trend. Instead of focusing on his PhD, he started reading about the history of World War 2 and the rise of the nazi Germany.

The fake news pandemic made him think about George Orwell’s “memory hole”, a propaganda tool described in his book “1984”. A memory hole is a mechanism for deliberate alteration of documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, as part of an attempt to re-write history.


Sam figured that the memory hole isn’t describing a dystopian future, but our actual reality.

The series of events that happened led Sam to realize that people’s ability to speak the truth and to remember the past are the two fundamental aspects that keep a society free.

Sam was just one student tackling a huge problem. But if he could help improve one tiny thing, then it’s worth trying. The idea then clicked in his mind: decentralized ledgers allow you to replicate information all over the world, and they’re highly resilient.

In its first form, the concept was to build a newspaper article archives which are mirrored all across the world on a blockchain. The challenge was that blockchains in their typical form couldn’t fit such large amounts of data, but a modified version can!

This led him to the idea of Arweave.


Sam decided to ditch his PhD and focus entirely on developing the concept for a decentralized permanent storage. He started building Arweave with William Jones, who was an assistant lecturer at the University of Kent.

William Jones earned a bachelor degree in mathematics and computer science at the University of Kent. Between 2014 and 2020, William earned his PhD in computer science with a focus on cognitive systems, statistics, machine learning and neural networks. His contribution to Arweave was between 2017 and 2018, where he served as the CTO of the company.

Sam Wilson would meet some of his future collaborators at the Techstars Berlin Accelerator.  Currently, Sam is serving as a mentor at the Techstars Berlin and he is also a technical advisor at Minespider, a supply-chain tracking platform. During their participation at the Techstars Berlin programme, the team received mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs and a few of them even decided to join Arweave.


Jeremy Epstein was the first advisor to join the board at Arweave on March 23, 2018. At the time, he was the President of the Crypto Explorers Association and CEO of Never Stop Marketing. Jeremy has also held a variety of senior marketing and community management roles at Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, and Sprinklr. Having advised esteemed projects such as IOTA and ARK, he regarded Arweave as a great company in the crypto industry.


Sebastian Campos Groth started working as the COO of Arweave from 2019 to the present. Apparently, Sam met Sebastian during Techstars Berlin programme, where he was a mentor. Sebastian worked as program manager at Techstars Berlin between 2017 and 2019.

India Raybould joined Arweave in 2017 as the Chief Coordination Officer and UX/UI designer. In 2014, India earned her bachelor degree in psychology at the University of Manchester. She graduated from Canterbury Christ Church University in 2017, where she worked as psychology student advisor and registry office assistant.

How is the Arweave (AR) token used?

The AR token is the native token for Arweave. All services in the Arweave ecosystem are denominated in AR, which makes it the default unit of account. Users pay miners a one-time fee denominated in AR in order to add their data to the Arweave network.This creates an incentive for miners to replicate the data in the network and constantly test its validity.

As of February 2022, the price to put on 1 MB of storage onto the network is around $0.01. 

The native token of a network is usually referred to as “gas.” Such is the situation with Arweave, where the AR token is paid to secure transfers on the network. With a limited supply of AR tokens (66 million), this ensures miners get their pay and the value of the token can appreciate over time, making the network more valuable.


The AR token has use cases beyond the miner fee, however. Arweave designed the system so that 86% of costs paid to host data onto the Arweave network goes into an endowment. This endowment is distributed to miners over time to ensure the storage lasts for literally centuries. The sustainability of the endowment model is backed by the assumption of decreasing storage prices over time.

Over the past 50 years, the average annual rate of decline in storage costs has been 30.6%. Arweave assumes that data storage costs will decline by just 0.5% per year. The initial cost to upload data on the Arweave network covers the first 200 years of storage. If the data costs decline more than 0.5% per year, this simply adds to the number of years the data is stored. 

For example, with a 2% decrease in storage costs, instead of 200 years of storage you would get 300 years.


The endowment is similar to a non-profit. The endowment will use the interest off the money raised to pay the costs of the organization.  In the event that a file becomes less popular, the endowment will incentivize miners to store such files and further secure its permanence.

As we can tell, the endowment is helping to build an extra layer of security for the mining process. For the user, this is an incentive to buy and use AR tokens, which further secures the network.

Arweave was released with an initial supply of 55 million AR. As of 2018, the total maximum supply has been capped at 66 million AR tokens. New AR token issuance is similar to Bitcoin’s model, in which coins released are halved at regular intervals, except that Arweave continuously halves its issuance rate whereas Bitcoin has predetermined halving events.

Arweave is currently listed on multiple exchanges. The major ones are Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.

If you want to skip ahead and learn how to earn more Arweave by running a validator node at home check out our Arweave Mining & Staking guide. It includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $AR in 2024 and beyond.

Who is developing Arweave (AR) now?

Development on Arweave started in 2017 by a Sam Williams and William Jones, who later operate under their own company called Minimum Spanning Technologies. The company has been incorporated on July 28, 2017, and its only member today is its co-founder, Sam Williams.

After validating their idea, Sam and William joined the Techstars Berlin accelerator in October 2017. At the event, Arweave would build its core team formed of 4 more members. William Jones would depart from Arweave one year later and be replaced by the current CTO Jesper Noehr.


The Arweave team is solely responisible for handling the development of the core protocol. On the other hand, the protocol is governed entirely by the miners, who can use a blacklist system to defend from attackers. Content that is rejected by more than half the network will be rejected across the entire network.

The governance model has been subject to controversy since anyone can use Arweave to store files. In the case of sensitive information, miner consensus still prevails, although there has been no such scenario. The founding Arweave team is working with the Internet Watch Foundation to provide the maintainers of the Arweave network with the capabilities that they need to keep their systems and the permaweb safe from abusive material.

Data storers can also elect not to replicate any material from the network, for any reason, if they feel that it is inappropriate for storage. A detailed description of the content moderation policy is outline in Arweave’s yellowpaper.

Open source contributors are also important, and they come in the form of people building their own products on top of the Arweave protocol with the blessing of the core team.


In 2019, Arweave announced its first Arweave Community Fund DAO. The DAO allocates resources in the form of grants, bounties and other ecosystem work without limitations.

In the beginning of 2020, Arweave launched its 2nd DAO, named ARCA. Membership is made out of long term miners, developers, and backers involved in the Arweave community, and its goal is to allocate funding to promising projects building on Arweave.

Another powerful initiative was the launch of Arweave boost, which helps startups and companies run their infrastructure on top of Arweave network. The “boost” consists of up to $50K worth of permanent data storage and direct access to the Arweave team. As of the result of Arweave’s funding, several community governed projects have spun out.


In 2020, ArDrive was launched as a user-friendly platform that leverages Arweave’s permaweb. The platform represents a popular service for users to store their data, business documents, or NFTs. Unsurprisingly, after the NFT frenzy started, thousand of users were flocking to ArDrive to store the data of their NFTs, securing it for the next 200 years.


Another popular product built on top of Arweave is Verto, a framework for decentralized exchanges. Although the project is still in the testnet, it’s featured on Arweave’s main page. Perhaps the biggest product built on top of Arweave are the Profit Sharing Communities.


Launched in August 2020, profit sharing communities are a new, fairer structure for web startups. Based on the Arweave protocol, profit sharing contributors earn tokens in the form of dividends generated by the usage of apps. In such setting, external contributors and founders split the profits every time a user interacts with the app in a way that generates a transaction on the Arweave network.

What are the latest updates on Arweave (AR)?

Arweave in 2017

2017 was Arweave’s launch year. The project was kickstarted by two PhD dropouts who saw the potential of blockchain to defend data alteration by adversary states. 

Launched initially as Archain, the project set out from the start to become a decentralized storage network.

In the beginning, Arweave was started out by two people who both worked exclusively on the technical side of Arweave. During its first months, the team conducted network tests to simulate Arweave’s behavior at a large scale. The model was designed right from the start to enable infinite storage over centuries. This meant simulations in case of a hard fork, double spending attacks and so forth.

Within weeks, the first version of the whitepaper was released. It had 9 pages and contained a bird’s-eye view explanation of how Arweave worked. During the testing period, the ARC token has been changed to AR, without changing its utility or tokenomics. It was a small change that would announce larger developments when Arweave would join the Techstars Berlin accelerator next year.


In order to attract more feedback, Arweave organized its first app development competition. To incentivize participation, Arweave offered around 255K AR tokens for the top 3 entries. Given that the project was nothing more than a testnet at this phase, the expectation was to gain the interest of builders so they can scale the network.

Shortly after, the alpha testnet network went live and Arweave achieved its main objective: to attract enough backers so they can solve any remaining network bugs. By the end of the year, Arweave released the BATN.2 upgrade, which supported archiving of the internet for the first time. However, the only type of archiving supported was just text files for the cost of 1 AR.

The team stressed that the final release would have more capabilities, but for the sake of the testnet it was enough to keep the development going smoothly. Small improvements have been made on the client running side, which meant users could join the network easier and the network would recover from blockweave forks easier. Overall, the update brought more stability to Arweave and pushed the team forward to its next steps.

Early on, the Arweave team realized that mass-market appeal will be key to mass adoption. For comparison, in 2017, CryptoKitties was the most popular application on Ethereum. On December 11, the second major app was launched on Arweave. “ArchiveIt!” was a sweet and simple archiving app. All the user had to do was drag and drop the file, like you would do for Dropbox.

The purpose of the app was to demonstrate the flexibility and usefulness of Arweave as an application platform. One major shortcoming of the app was that the files were not encrypted. On the good side, the project backers saw a tangible result of their effort.

Arweave in 2018

2018 was the year where Arweave would make its first public appearance. The team had joined the Techstars Berlin programme. For this reason, they’ve decided to postpone the mainnet release as they saw more opportunity to improve their company before going live.

On Februray 1st, 2018, Arweave launched the BATN.4 testnet, where pre-sale contributors could participate in test mining on the network.

On February 22, 2018, the public testnet was launched, which meant everyone could join the mining community.

The initial date of the mainnet was set on June 8, 2018. By then, ArchiveIt! would have the permanent storage functionality and people would be able to use Arweave’s permanent on-demand storage service.


After a lengthy selection process, Arweave was accepted to participate in Techstars Berlin. Techstars offers 13 weeks of intensive mentoring and project development opportunities, including connecting companies like Arweave with an array of world-renowned specialists.

This was Arweave’s big chance to get noticed and obtain funding for the startup.

At Techstars, new members would join the team along with experienced advisors. It was also the time when Arweave rebranded from Archain, and their website was republished.


On April 18, 2018, Techstars programme had ended, and the team showcased their prototype to the investors. At the end of the programme, Arweave was starting to look like a solid project and was ready for its next milestone: the token sale.

The first round of the token sale was dedicated to the early backers, and raised $900K worth of AR tokens. The second round was capped at $675K and was aimed at community members who have recently discovered the project. By then, 1000s of users were joining Arweave’s social media and the hype was building up for the mainnet.

On July 13, 2018, Arweave went on mainnet.

The token sale had concluded with a total whitelist of over 30,000 unique people. In addition to individual community members, the team has brought a wide array of great institutional partners such as Arrington XRP Capital, KuCoin Capital and a dozen other VCs. In short, the Arweave mainnet was a resounding success!

Community support has played a major role in Arweave’s development moving forward. Just two months after the mainnet launch, their open source GitHub repository passed over 1000 commits, and the team was on track to deliver the N.1.5 update. A block explorer was released as well as an improved version of the web extension wallet.


Sam Williams was promoting Arweave at Dezentral in Berlin, and Blockchain UA in Kiev, boosting the Arweave following. Another important update was the release of a decentralized public library. A component of the wider Arweave project, the DPL was laser-focused on creating a truly permanent hand-curated archive of human history. The objective was to demonstrate Arweave’s resilience against censorship, cyberattacks and third party failure.

It was also a good occasion for the community to put their AR tokens to good use.

Arweave in 2019

The year 2019 started out with another major update: the launch of the permaweb. It was an immutable decentralized web that incentivized participants to store the data. Users wouldn’t have to worry about their files getting deleted or corrupted and the storage required zero maintenance.

Their selling proposition was: put your spare hard drive to work and make money.

Along with the launch, Arweave was pushing hard to attract builders to its network. The team used their funds to fund ideas worth implementing and even offered projects the spotlight. Despite the bear market at the time, Arweave was focused on keeping the community engaged by organizing hackathons and announcing new partnerships. One partnership was with Everipedia, a project involving founders from Wikipedia and Genius.com.


The community had built several dapps revolving around Arweave. For example, people were building network stats, previews for transactions, tweet bots, and an Arweave whale watch. All this commitment from the community had helped the project stay relevant and attract more funding. 

Leading venture firms Union Square Ventures, Multicoin Capital, and a16z had announced they’ve bought AR tokens. Along with their capital came the support needed to scale the permaweb. Arweave now had a legal expert from a16z, a Web3 infrastructure expert from Multicoin Capital, and an experienced advisor from Union Square Ventures.

On December 12, 2019, Arweave has announced its first Community Fund DAO. Up to this point, Arweave controlled all the adoption efforts. It was time to see how well the community would coordinate itself as Arweave was becoming more decentralized.

The role of the DAO was to allocate grants, bug bounties and other resources to its builders. Initial team members of the DAO were old members who contributed to the project, but the core team would have a say in choosing the board members.

Named “Community Funding A” meant that Arweave was planning to create more such funds in the event that the experiment went well. At the end of 2019, Arweave had received over 150 new web applications on the permaweb.

Developers were excited to join the movement and come out with creative projects that leveraged the permaweb. The most successful application was “ArAcademic,” a platform that allows users to publish academic articles under a Creative Commons license or under Open Access, original work.

ArAcademic boasts a number of features, including a distraction free editor with auto save, instant preview, and multi-device editing.

ArweaveID was the second highlight in terms of output. It was a simple identity registry for Arweave addresses. Once you have created an ID that is linked to your wallet address, you can use your identity across many permaweb platforms, such as: forums, publishing platforms, and more.

Arweave in 2020

In January 23, 2020, Arweave announced its second DAO called ARCA. Its purpose is the same as the Community Funding DAO, and its starting budget is $25,000. ARCA is formed of 17 veteran community members, and it’s set to operate independently from day 1. 

On March 5, 2020, Arweave launched the Arweave Boost. The initiative comes to help startups or companies who want to use the permaweb to store their data. This time around, companies would receive the support of VCs as well as direct access to the Arweave core team. To help on the integration side, Arweave offered $50,000 worth of storage space to encourage companies to apply.

In the same month, Arweave has raised $8.3 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures. These funds would be allocated for the ecosystem initiatives. The team stressed that the entire funds will be spent on projects building on top of Arweave.


On April 28, 2020, Arweave has announced its new logo inspired by the — U+24D0 in the Unicode character set. The upgrade comes with a revamp of the old website to better reflect the protocol’s evolution.

On April 30, 2020, Arweave 2.0 went live. The upgrade represents a significant milestone for the Arweave protocol, dramatically increasing the practical block size of the network. Arweave 2.0 introduced the innovative Fast Write mechanism, removing limits for how quickly data can be written to the Arweave network. Simultaneously, the core Arweave team released the specification and implementations for their ‘layer two’ scalability solution — bundled transactions.

On June 16, 2020, Arweave introduced the Profit Sharing Communities, a mechanism for incentivization. In short, PSC enables developers to monetize their apps and profit from their real world usage with a new tool — profit sharing tokens.


The PSC launch was quickly followed by a $100,000 incubator available for investment in profit sharing tokens. 100 days in, and nearly 30 startups were founded on the PSC initiative. Over $1 million of investment was committed to PSCs, and large communities of active users formed.

In September, Arweave released what is effectively a Layer-2 scaling solution: Bundles.

With bundling, each Arweave transaction is moved off-chain, grouped with other ones, and then placed back onto the main chain as one large transaction. The upshot is that extremely large data files can be easily uploaded to Arweave’s network. For example, 47GB of data was uploaded in one single block.

On December 22, 2020, Arweave announced its “SOLAR Bridge,” which connects Arweave to the Solana network. The bridge progressively and automatically stores data from the Solana blockchain onto the permaweb, ensuring that Solana’s entire ledger history is made available on public infrastructure in perpetuity.


By the end of the year, “ArDrive” was coming out as a powerful service built on top of the Arweave network. ArDrive offers an experience similar to Dropbox, where users can store their data at low prices. Although the platform was still in alpha, it was open for the people to use.

Arweave in 2021

Arweave started out 2021 strong. The protocol has integrated Snapshot for community voting and it has started collaborating with Parity Technologies to use Arweave for storing data on the Polkadot parachain.

Arweave 2.3 upgrade has been introduced with improvements for miner node syncing, meaning miners can contribute and get rewards much sooner. The core dev team has also laid the groundwork for the introduction of the new mining algorithm — Succinct Random Proofs of Access (SPoRAs).


There have also been upgrades to the SmartWeave protocol. It’s now possible to send fees to token holders, send tags, and interact with contracts all in one single transaction.

On February 17, 2021, Arweave introduced its third incubator programme: the Open Web Foundry. The programme will help startups from the initial idea, to product, to acquiring users and pitching to top-tier investors.


At this point, more than $1.25 million in seed investments have been made across dozens of participating projects. The Arweave core team pledged $100,000 in total across the projects submitted during the Open Web Foundry programme.

At 20:03 EST on February 24th, the first SPoRA block was mined on the Arweave network.

Until this date, Arweave was running its Proof of Access consensus. Block 633719 was the last PoA block on the Arweave network before the upgrade to SPoRA began. This marks the biggest protocol upgrade to date.

In May, Arweave has held its first conference: ArConf#1. From developers & builders to end users & evangelists, many gathered for this capstone event rounding off our recent Open Web Foundry incubator programme.


In the meantime, profit sharing communities were continuing to grow. Projects like ArConnect, Sarcophagus and ArDrive have experienced more traction than ever before.

On the permaweb side of things, new projects have emerged. Some of the prototypes for these projects have been showcased at the ArConf. During the NFT hype, people began flocking to Arweave in order to store the data of their NFTs permanently.

People’s interest in Arweave spiked as Sam Williams was attending more conferences, speaking about the utility of decentralized storage. 

On November 19, Arweave has made the first integration for its layer-2 solution, Bundlr Network. Polygon was the first network to partner for the initiative. On this occasion Anweave & Polygon offered a $9000 grant for the integration of Bundlr to mobile wallets.

At the height of the bull run, AR token experienced its all-time high. On November 5, 2021, AR was trading for $90.94. Despite the increasing demand for storage space, AR wouldn’t be able to hold its value and has since dropped below $10.

Arweave in 2022

On April 14, Arweave storage has become available on the Avalanche network. Users can now pay for permanent storage using Avalanche wallets and AVAX tokens. This opens a new design space for building truly decentralized applications on Avalanche, where everything from the UI to the smart contracts to the database is decentralized.

Examples could include a full-stack decentralized social network, or an Avalanche version of Decentraland, only this time fully decentralized and immutable. This interoperability is enabled by the Bundlr Network — which operates as an aggregator on top of Arweave by collecting many pieces of data and submitting them to the Arweave network in a single base-layer transaction.

On April 28, Arweave has released a (a sticker) that will allow developers and organizations using Arweave to easily portray to their users that their data or service is stored securely and permanently on Arweave. The idea came up as art communities started to embrace Arweave for being a decentralized and immutable permanent store.

Arweave was lauded by Sotheby’s as "the most robust decentralized storage solution" and has been adopted by seminal projects in this space such as BT’s Genesis.json and Jay Z’s Heir to the Throne NFT.


On September, it was announced that a teenager founder for a Arweave-based platform has raised $30 million. The announcement made waves, with the story being featured by Bloomberg. For the remainder of the year, apps built on top of Arweave would take the central spot.

One interesting initiative is the VouchDAO, a project that would ensure the permaweb is free. StampCoin is also an upcoming project that enables users to rate and reward content on the permaweb.

Arweave in 2023

In 2023, Arweave introduced the Framework for Evolving Arweave, a groundbreaking model designed to drive the protocol's evolution through strategic forking. This framework is the result of extensive research, rigorous community discussions, meticulous modeling, and years of exploration. It holds the key to sustainable innovation and resilience, paving the way for Arweave's enduring relevance in the dynamic landscape of the future.

At the core of open decentralized protocols lies a fundamental principle: self-governance through intrinsic mechanisms, void of any central authority or governing body. For Arweave, a protocol built for permanent data storage, the ability to adapt within an inevitably shifting environment is paramount. Without mechanisms that facilitate upgrades and innovation, a protocol risks stagnation, vulnerability to exploits, and inadequacy for emerging use cases.

While many protocols have attempted to codify governance mechanisms, like token voting DAOs, they often proved less robust than anticipated. Cases of governance dysfunction in platforms like Uniswap and MakerDAO have highlighted a regression to traditional corporate behaviors, undermining the principle of immutable rights for users. These dynamics pose substantial threats to the neutrality, utility, and longevity of such protocols.

In a deliberate departure from these issues, Arweave has embraced a distinct approach: protocol evolution, outlined comprehensively in The Framework for Evolving Arweave, launched in March. This evolutionary strategy establishes a resilient and market-oriented process for network upgrades, embracing healthy competition.


Under this framework, anyone aspiring to innovate on the protocol can introduce their own fork and create an additional reward, incentivizing developers to deliver maximum value to users. It's a process that ensures the most beneficial improvements and features are adopted, allowing Arweave to adapt and enhance through motivated individuals rewarded by the market. This dynamic stands in sharp contrast to traditional models of protocol governance reliant on committee-led innovation. Evolution transforms the process into a rapid, iterative cycle akin to a dynamic startup industry, ensuring that protocol upgrades are shaped by a market of ideas and merit, empowering users and token-holders to adopt or reject innovations as they deem appropriate.

In essence, protocol evolution heralds a profound shift in the competitive landscape. Builders are now substantially incentivized to innovate atop Arweave, claim a reward, and foster a shift from competitive energy to collaborative and prosocial cooperation. It's a revolutionary approach that ensures Arweave remains at the forefront of innovation and user-centric progress, ensuring a vibrant and lasting future for this pioneering protocol.

Arweave is in a constant growth cycle, and network participants like us can earn more $AR without too much hassle or technical knowledge, right from the comfort of our homes. 

Learn how to do that in our Arweave Mining & Staking guide, which includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $AR in 2024 and beyond.

Ultimate Web3 Automation

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Summary, History and Status of Polygon (MATIC) — 2024 Edition

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Mining and Staking BNB Chain (BNB)

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $BTC

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Summary, History and Status of Flow (FLOW) — 2024 Edition

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $ASTR

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $ICP

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Mining and Staking Flow (FLOW)

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Summary, History and Status of Hedera (HBAR) — 2024 Edition

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Mining and Staking Polkadot (DOT)

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Summary, History and Status of Celo (CELO)

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Summary, History and Status of Solana (SOL) — 2024 Edition

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $SOL

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $XTZ

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Summary, History and Status of Litecoin (LTC)

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Investing in Celo (CEL)

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $AURORA

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Summary, History and Status of Avalanche (AVAX) — 2024 Edition

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Summary, History and Status of Astar (ASTR)

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Summary, History and Status of Polkadot (DOT) — 2024 Edition

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Summary, History and Status of Secret (SCRT) — 2024 Edition

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Investing in Waves (WAVES)

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Summary, History and Status of NEAR (NEAR) — 2024 Edition

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $NEAR

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $FLOW

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Mining and Staking Dogecoin (DOGE)

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Summary, History and Status of Filecoin (FIL)

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $ETH

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $CEL

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Summary, History and Status of Dogecoin (DOGE) — 2024 Edition

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $HNT

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Mining and Staking Moonbeam (GLMR)

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Mining and Staking Kava (KAVA)

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Investing in Stacks (STX)

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Summary, History and Status of Moonbeam (GLMR) — 2024 Edition

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Mining and Staking Solana (SOL)

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Investing in Polygon (MATIC)

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Mining and Staking Cosmos (ATOM)

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $TRX

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Investing in Cosmos (ATOM)

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Summary, History and Status of Bitcoin (BTC) — 2024 Edition

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Summary, History and Status of Mina (MINA) — 2024 Edition

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How to Store, Transfer and Bridge $STX

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Summary, History and Status of Cardano (ADA) — 2024 Edition

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Summary, History and Status of Aurora (AURORA)

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Summary, History and Status of Algorand (ALGO)

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