Arweave Ecosystem Update: 100 Days of Profit Sharing Communities
TL;DR Since we introduced profit sharing communities (PSCs) in mid-August, there has been an explosion of growth. With nearly 30 startups founded, over $1 million of investment committed to PSCs, and large communities of active users formed, the PSC ecosystem is off to an incredible start.
Just over 100 days ago, we first introduced profit sharing communities (PSCs) to the Arweave ecosystem, triggering an incredible response from users, developers, and investors. These profit sharing communities provide a new, fairer way to structure web startups, combining the power of profit sharing tokens with the governance mechanisms of a DAO.
Since mid-August, we have run two acceleration programmes, the Open Web Incubator (OWI) and the Open Web Fellowship (OWF). Both programmes focused on supporting brand new and existing startups in the PSC ecosystem, offering mentorship and guidance alongside expert masterclasses and technical assistance, plus $100,000 in investment per programme from the Arweave core team. The results have been outstanding! Today, only one third of startups from the OWF Demo Day still have open fundraising rounds, and approximately $1m of capital (excluding that provided by the Arweave team) has been committed to support the projects. Participating projects have already created active communities with hundreds of users and investors from all over the world, offering a diverse range of different products and services. Keep reading for an overview of what we’ve been up to, profiles of some of the startups, an update on the ARCA DAO, and more!
The Overview
- Over 30 fully-fledged profit sharing communities have been launched
- Over $10 million in combined, market-validated valuations for PSCs so far
- Over $1 million in investment has been committed to PSCs, including $200,000 from the Arweave core team, plus world-leading external investors
- 56 paid work opportunities have been created on communityXYZ, making it the second largest job board in crypto
- 214 individual support, advice, and mentorship meetings with community founders
- 13 masterclass sessions delivered by leading experts
- 10 Hack & Tell episodes with founders showcasing their projects, demoing their dapps, and sharing their journey so far
- 27 individual project pitches & presentations
- 3 showcase events where founders pitched their creations to world-leading investors from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, 1kx Network, & many more
Learn more about top communities:
A huge range of profit sharing communities have been launched in just the past 100 days, including everything from music distribution platforms, to file storage solutions, developer tools, archiving bots, a decentralised exchange, and much, much more! In this section we’ll showcase some of the leading profit sharing communities so you can learn more and get involved!
Financial applications
Limestone
Limestone is a decentralised oracle providing pricing data for financial protocols, leveraging the Arweave network to offer affordable storage with a permanent audit trail. Limestone’s staking mechanisms ensure that dispute resolution is robust and fair, with incentives offered for those that accurately report errors and those who evaluate those reports. Limestone even enables cross-chain bridges, and linking of user identities. Limestone’s future includes many more integrations, and more advanced features to be released in 2021.
Check out the Limestone Demo Day pitch here to learn more about the project, its applications, and its future in 2021.
Verto
Verto is a completely decentralized network of trading posts built on top of the Arweave network. Staking and slashing mechanisms are in place to maintain accurate reputational scores of these trading posts, and a new JavaScript library allows other permaweb platforms (such as communityXYZ) to integrate Verto seamlessly. Verto also released Astatine, a ‘usage mining’ tool that profit sharing community founders can use to reward their early adopters and supporters with profit sharing tokens. Having achieved some incredible milestones since its launch just weeks ago, over $100,000 of value has now been traded on Verto!
Check out the Verto Demo Day pitch here, and learn all about Astatine here.
You can follow Verto’s progress on Twitter and Discord.
Content distribution platforms
ArcLight
ArcLight is a peer-to-peer music and audio content distribution platform built on the permaweb. With ArcLight, creators can upload their encrypted content — including singles, albums, podcasts, and sound effects — and define their own price for users to download it, all while cutting out the centralized middlemen of the traditional music industry.
Check out the ArcLight Pitch Day presentation here.
You can follow ArcLight’s progress on Twitter, Discord, and in their Telegram group and on their Telegram announcements channel.
Bandplay
Bandplay is a community-owned music platform that is laying the foundation for a decentralized music industry. Bandplay allows music lovers like you to support your favourite musicians while simultaneously investing in the future profits of their releases — cutting out the middlemen.
Check out the Bandplay Pitch Day presentation here.
You can follow Bandplay’s progress on Twitter and Discord.
Myco
Myco provides a platform for publishing user-owned and -governed online newsletters while creating additional tools for user-owned communities to create and distribute value together.
You can follow Myco’s progress on Twitter.
OpenBits
OpenBits is an open source package publication platform, focused on providing developers with a means of being rewarded for their contributions to the open source multiverse.
Check out the OpenBits Pitch Day presentation here.
You can follow OpenBits’ progress on Twitter and Discord.
W3Stream
W3Stream is a new kind of video streaming platform, powered by the permaweb. With W3Stream, content creators are directly rewarded by viewers for their releases, while their supporters can get directly involved in streams and share part of their favourite creators’ revenue. The alpha launch is expected in Q1 of 2021, with a range of new features and updates planned throughout the year!
Check out the W3Stream Pitch Day presentation here.
You can follow W3Stream’s progress on Discord.
Storage & archiving dapps
ArDrive
ArDrive is a community that provides censorship-resistant and permanent data storage solution, providing a Dropbox-style experience with both public and private drives so that anyone can store their important files forever. ArDrive usage is really taking off! Over the past 30 days alone, over 150 unique users have used ArDrive by creating almost 200 drives, and over 11,000 files have been uploaded.
ArDrive also recently announced two exciting initiatives giving away ARDRIVE profit sharing tokens! The Aztec campaign rewards you for using ArDrive’s Dropbox-style storage app, and the ShareYourDrive Twitter campaign rewards you for creating & sharing public drives!
Check out ArDrive’s Demo Day pitch here, and the ArDrive Hack & Tell episode here.
You can follow ArDrive’s progress on Twitter and Discord.
Gitopia
Gitopia is a decentralised home for your code repositories, ensuring that your code is never maliciously or inadvertently lost or corrupted. Gitopia, previously known as dgit, has come a long way in recent weeks! Gitopia is already being used on a daily basis by a majority of leading profit sharing communities to host their open source codebases, plus Arweave’s own code repos are mirrored there!
Check out Gitopia’s pitch at Demo Day here, and their guest appearance on an episode of Hack & Tell here.
You can follow Gitopia’s progress on Twitter and Discord.
Nest.Land
Nest.Land is a fully decentralized community project, offering a persistent module registry for the Deno package manager. By harnessing the power of Arweave’s permanent storage, Nest.Land offers truly reliable storage of and access to vital Deno packages for all developers. Already having cornered 20% of the Deno package space, Nest.Land rapidly growing in popularity by solving a real problem for developers.
Check out Nest.Land’s Demo Day video here.
You can follow Nest.Land’s progress on Twitter.
Permabot
Permabot is a Twitter bot service focused on archiving the content of tweets, not just the URL! This content is stored forever on the permaweb, allowing you to revisit it at any time, reliably. The Permabot open beta is due to be launched in Q1 of 2021, so stay tuned to take part soon.
Check out the Permabot Pitch Day presentation here.
You can follow Permabot’s progress on Discord and use the bot on Twitter.
Sarcophagus
Sarcophagus is a smart contracting network hosted on Arweave, allowing users to create a general purpose, self-sovereign, digital dead man’s switch, providing innovative defenses against digital threats. Use cases for Sarcophagus include will and testament document storage and password recovery.
You can follow Sarchopagus’ progress on Twitter, Discord and Telegram.
Infrastructure tools
Amplify
Amplify is the distributed economy for Arweave gateways, providing incentivisation for those who run trusted gateways. Acting as a consensus protocol for Arweave gateways, the Amplify protocol ensures that gateways act prosocially through staking and voting mechanisms.
Check out the Amplify Pitch Day presentation here.
You can follow Amplify’s progress on Discord.
ArGo: Permaweb deployment simplified
ArGo offers a one-click deployment tool that makes shipping to the permaweb quick and easy. With features enabling collaboration, automation, and integration with GitHub and GitLab, ArGo is quickly becoming the go-to deployment tool for permaweb developers.
The ArGo team recently announced their alpha launch, and are currently completing their pre-seed fundraising round! Watch this video to learn more about what’s next for ArGo in 2021, including new releases and features, including DNS integration and automated deployment. The ArGo team also appeared in an episode of Hack & Tell here.
Follow ArGo’s progress on Twitter or Discord.
communityXYZ
CommunityXYZ is a decentralized and permanent dashboard and governance platform for all profit sharing communities built on the Arweave permaweb. On communityXYZ, founders can create and manage their communities, and potential contributors can find paid opportunities to collaborate with existing projects. The recent integration of Verto on communityXYZ allows you to buy profit sharing tokens from your favourite communities without leaving the platform!
CommunityXYZ is paving the way for a brand new type of decentralized company structure, solving many of the problems with traditional startup fundraising models which are too often dependent on the whims of external stakeholders while founders lose control and their financial incentives are weakened.
Check out the communityXYZ Demo Day pitch here, and the Hack & Tell episode here.
You can follow communityXYZ’s progress on Twitter and Discord.
Verification services
ArVerify: The blue tick for the permaweb
ArVerify is a PSC bringing the blue tick functionality to the permaweb — ensuring that accounts are owned by real people, not bots or impersonators in turn boosting trust for all person-to-person interactions across the permaweb!
ArVerify is incredibly easy to integrate with new & existing permaweb dapps, using just one line of code! This simplicity will propel ArVerify further towards its goal of becoming the authenticity verification standard across the entire permaweb.
Check out ArVerify’s Demo Day pitch here, and their Hack & Tell episode here.
You can follow ArVerify’s progress on Discord.
Feather
Feather is a network for the verification and execution of code bringing a new cloud computing paradigm to the permaweb. This allows developers to utilise the cloud for code execution while remaining secure in the knowledge that the execution runs exactly as required. Code executors are also rewarded for their work.
Check out the Feather Pitch Day presentation here.
You can follow Feather’s progress on Discord, and by signing up to their newsletter here.
fQR Weave
fQR Weave is an anti-counterfeiting solution utilising QR codes and Arweave’s permanent storage. This project has come far in just a few short weeks, with over 7000 academic certifications already secured by fQR Weave. Soon, every month high quality face masks worth $175,000 will be backed by fQR Weave too!
Check out the fQR Weave Pitch Day presentation here.
You can follow fQR Weave’s progress on Twitter, Discord, and Telegram.
WeaveID
WeaveID lets you login to your Arweave wallet with just an email address and a password. Now you can access your favorite dApps from any device without having to juggle keyfiles! For developers, adding WeaveID to any app takes only a few minutes.
Check out the WeaveID Demo Day pitch here.
You can follow WeaveID’s progress on Twitter.
What a list! Remember to stay tuned for further updates on future programmes — we’ve got some exciting stuff in the works. A huge thank you goes out to everyone who made the last 100 days an enormous success.
ARCA DAO
We caught up with the ARCA DAO to see what they’ve been up to. They have recently secured funding for the second stage of their independent gateway, and this stage includes an open-source implementation of the new / graphql endpoint, amongst other features.
ARCA is also on the cusp of firing up an initial test AuthNode in conjunction with the ArVerify project. ArVerify is a means of associating your true identity with your wallet address and ARCA will be set as the first 3rd party AuthNode. The AuthNode is like an Oracle for authenticating via various methods. The initial test node will verify users through their Google account, but many other verification methods are planned — Implementation is currently in progress.
To stay up to date with all things ARCA, you can follow their Twitter account here.
Arweave in the Wild
What is Arweave? Via Kraken: https://www.kraken.com/en-gb/learn/what-is-arweave-ar
Solana Taps Into Arweave for Decentralized Storage: https://decrypt.co/50718/solana-taps-into-arweave-for-decentralized-storage
Nervos developers can benefit from Arweave storage: https://medium.com/nervosnetwork/nervos-developers-can-benefit-from-arweave-storage-by-joining-boost-program-81dce933243e
Blockswap: Enabling DAO Baker data on Arweave: https://medium.com/crypto-capital-markets/enabling-permanent-data-availability-for-dao-baker-with-arweave-9fd212f5730
See you on the permaweb!
-arweave-team
