Arweave which was previously known as Archain is a blockchain-based platform that provides scalable low-cost, high-throughput and permanent on-chain data storage.
Four core technologies which Arweave uses:
1. Wildfire which is an incentive mechanism that stimulates miners to share data with each other. The faster data is stored and shared with other miners in the network, the easier it will be for a miner to build positive reputation. This ensures the data is readily available whenever an access is requested.
2. Arweave introduced Blockshadows to increase transaction throughput and enable fast block consensus. Blockshadows partially decouples transactions from blocks and only sends a minimal block which called “shadow”, such as hash list, transaction hash, wallet list hash, and etc. that allows peers to reform a full block to increase transaction throughput and enable fast block of consensus.
3. Proof of Access and Proof of Work which Arweave uses as consensus mechanism. By using these, miners have not only to store all of the blocks, but also store any previous blocks to generate a new block.
4. Arweave uses Blockweave which is the structure of blockchain created to provide a low cost ands calable on-chain. Due to an increasing of the amount of data stored in the system, the amount of hashing needed for consensus decreases, thus reducing the cost of storing data.
Appliances:
- Decentralized data sharing which is pricing function that allows for load-balancing demand and supply at fair prices because content can be uploaded by whoever and shared with anybody.
- AR or native token which is primary use to add data to the blockweave is the utility token.
- Decentralized data collaboration: Allows for availability of experimental databases for review meaning anybody can challenge and/or confirm its quality. The academic publishing market is around 25 billion USD and Arweave has already partnered with Charité (check partners) in that regard.
- Decentralized data storage of Arweave allows corporate or personal files to be stored for a single fee rather than monthly subscription. AR token price can be cheaper than the monthly fees paid for others competitors, such as Filecoin which is blockchain space. Data availability is almost instant due to the creation of the blockchain incentive mechanism
- Arweve creates decentralized data protection/identity which means that content created online can provide proof of ownership and be timestamped.
Competition:
The competition in the data storage niche is fierce. Not only many established centralized entities such as Google and Amazon, but also Arweave will face tough competition from its blockchain rivals such as Storj, Siacoin, Lightstreams, Filecoin, Bluzelle, and others. Although Arweave have stated in their lightpaper that their solution costs only a fraction of the price as compared to Filecoin, Siacoin and Storj, it would be interesting to see how it competes with Lightsteams who seems to be their closest rival and is also planning to do an ICO around the same time.
Team:
Team of 8 with 5 devs. The founding team is in experienced with most of the them being fresh graduates and some decent advisors-Manager at Opera, Managing Director at Techstars, and Head of Growth at Quantstamp.
- Co-Founder&CEO:Sam Williams, Education: PhD, Computer Science at University of Kent (373rd World). Assistant Lecturer at University of Kent, CEO&Co-founder of Minimum Spanning technologies
- Co-Foudner&CTO: William Jones, Education: PhD, Computer Science at University of Kent, CTO&Co-founder of Minimum Spanning Technologies(present)-nothing found, Assistant Lecturer at University of Kent
- CCO&Deisgner: India Raybould, Education: BS, Psychology, University of Manchester. Psychology student advisor at Canterbury Christ Church University
- Developer’s Team Highlights: PHP dev at boohoo.com (large UK-based online fashion retailer), Head of Blockchain Solutions at The Vanbex Group (company specialized in consulting, communications & development for global blockchain businesses)
Advisors:
- Anthony Ryan: Head of Growth at Quantstamp
- Jesper Noehr: Project Manager Opera (1y in 2006–2007)
- Jeremy Epstein: VP-Marketing&Social Navigator at Sprinklr (large company), Cargill (large international food producer and marketer)
- Bruno De Sousa: Head of Business Development of Cargill
- Julian Lenz: Techstars mentor, and a crypto investor since 2013. Nothing found on LinkedIn
- Rob Johnson: Managing Director at Techstars
- Fabian Dudek: Entrepreneur. Founder of nestpick (aggregator platform for midterm, furnished rentals-received 13 million USD funding), GlassDollar, Entrepreneur in Residence at Techstars
- Christian Eggert: Tech entrepreneur of Bonativo (german food delivery company — 3.2 million EUR funding) and MINODES( platform of Consumer Analytics and Marketing Services, received 7.6 million EUR, acquired by Telefónica NEXT)
Partners:
- Techstars (large seed accelerator) -Arweave is officially a member of the TechStars Berlin city 2018 startup accelerator programme. Techstars also invested in the project
- Charité –One of the largest university hospitals in Europe. Arweave will be collaborating with biomedical scientists from Charité to create a new open access scientific journal.The Journal of Raw Data will be an online-only open access peer-reviewed biomedical data journal, utilizing the Arweave network for truly permanent data storage
- Upvest: Platform to purchase, store and trade cryptographic tokens.Responsible for the ICO process
- Shelf Network -Protocol as a platform to offer multi merchant auctioning. They will use Arweave’s data structure to store auction listings
- Northblock:Providing consultancy and advisory services to the project
Token Metrics:
- Hardcap: 8.7 million USD
- Total Tokens: 65 million in total, 55 million Genesis Block and 11 million for mining
- MVP: Github: https://github.com/ArweaveTeam/arweave. Mainnet 8th of June
- Crowdsale: Before mainnet launch on 8th of June
- Symbol: AR, native token (ERC-20 won’t be issued)
Pros and Cons:
Advantages:
- Data storage economy is expected to continue growing in a very fast pace
- Active and good Github presentation, mainenet is launching on 8th of June
- Solid partnerships and advisors
- Low cap and and decent market awareness
Disadventages:
- Most of the core team members are fresh graduates
- Saturated space with strong competition
- Lack of important information like roadmap, whitepaper and detailed token metrics and more
Arweave has been on my radar for some time now and I like the project. I do like the idea and I think it will definitely find a good use case. The team have an active Github with good documentation and notes how to use it. The project is in a real development process and the mainnet launch is expected in a few short weeks- 8th of June (testnet has been out for 7 months). On top of that –Arweave has good set of advisors, such as Techstars and Charité are on board as investors and/or partners and all of this speaks for the project’s qualities. Moreover, it provides a use case for the platform. For all this-I give the team credit for being able to deliver. Another best point is the hardcap of 8.7 million USD, which is really low in the ICO world, especially given the deep development stage they are in. Competition is getting bigger in the data storage space, such as Siacoin, , Lightstreams, Storj, Filecoin, and Bluzelle which is database storage. All of these projects managed to create buzz around them and the ones listed are doing well compared to their ICO price. Key here is to think whether Arweave stands out somehow from the rest and they do have some innovations in place like the proof of access mechanism and the permanent storage feature.
In short –an idea with increasing use case, working product, good set of partners and advisors, good market awareness and a low cap of 8.7 million USD. There is a fair share of missing information, but I have a positive stance on the short and long term potential of the project.
