Arweave Ecosystem Update: Featured in NY Times & World Economic Forum, partnership with Polkadot, and much more!
Activity in the permaweb ecosystem has been absolutely exploding this month! Check out some of the highlights from the past month, including Arweave’s feature in the World Economic Forum’s crypto report plus in a New York Times piece on blockchain’s ability to combat authoritarianism, and a collaboration with Parity Technologies aimed at utilising Arweave for the storage of Polkadot parachain data!
Profit Sharing Communities
Verto
The Verto team has been busy building and shipping updates, including a decentralised one-way burncoin inside SmartWeave: paving the way for DAOs and other smart contracts on the network to move representations of the tokens in the base chain. Alongside this, they released Tippar: a library that anyone can use to route profits through to owners of funds, funds-of-funds, proxies, profit splitters, and even more. The team is also working on a new mobile wallet for AR, plus they’re trialling a new swap interface! WeaveID — the email & password-style log in experience for the permaweb — is also coming soon to Verto, making the platform’s user experience even more sleek and efficient.
The team behind the Verto protocol is moving towards a ‘building in public’ model — if you want to join the conversation, check out their Discord server, and follow them on Twitter.
ArDrive
ArDrive, the full-featured file storage dapp harnessing the power of the permaweb, launched its web app last week! Complete with both public (unencrypted and shareable) and private (encrypted) drives, ArDrive is an excellent choice for any files you want to store truly permanently. Check it out here.
To compliment its brand new web app, ArDrive is running a competition where the top 20 uploaders before the 4th of Feb will win free ArDrive profit sharing tokens! Find out how to get involved here. Also, follow ArDrive on Twitter and on Discord to stay up-to-date with the latest news from this stellar profit sharing community.
ArVerify
The ArVerify team has built a decentralised system for detecting bots on the permaweb. Permaweb apps can now employ strong Sybil-resistance in just a couple of lines of JS. ArVerify is currently being integrated with many apps, including community.XYZ, and is well on the way to providing the ‘blue tick for the permaweb’ we’ve all been waiting for! You can follow ArVerify’s progress on Discord.
Amplify
Amplify is a project focused on bringing robust incentives to Arweave gateway nodes. So far, these efforts have resulted in an >20x speed up in some queries, and incredible progress is being made ahead of Amplify’s launch. You can follow Amplify’s progress on Discord.
Evermore
Evermore, a permaweb file storage app, is now available for both Windows and MacOS systems! Head here to download either version, and follow Evermore for future updates. Plus, if you want to learn how to earn Evermore profit sharing tokens just for using the app, check out the recent explainer video here.
ArGo
ArGo, the permaweb deployment app, recently launched their beta, plus support for Angular & Next web apps, and DNS integration. ArGo are also currently offering rewards of up to thousands of ArGo profit sharing tokens for new users who deploy websites — make sure you take part before the end of February! Join the team on Discord to learn more about their rewards campaign, and give them a follow on Twitter for future updates!
FQRweave
fQR Weave is an anti-counterfeiting and authentication solution utilising the permaweb. The team recently partnered with nanotech.co to integrate fQR Weave codes with products that fight the spread of coronavirus, such as hand sanitiser and face masks!
Plus, the fQR Weave SDK 0.0.2 was recently released, making it possible to generate bulk fQRs with a few lines of code by interacting with their custom generator instance. Follow fQR Weave on Twitter here, and Discord here.
Limestone
Limestone, the permaweb-based DeFi ecosystem dapp, recently passed 100,000 transactions — congratulations to the Limestone team! You can follow Limestone on Twitter and Discord.
Viewblock: Profit Sharing Tokens
Profit sharing tokens (PSTs) on Arweave are now available on the Viewblock block explorer! Statistics include token tracking, number of token holders, token supply, transaction history, and more. Head over to Viewblock now and explore profit sharing tokens.
New on the permaweb
Snapshot
Governance interface Snapshot recently integrated Arweave as data storage. Run by programmable liquidity protocol Balancer Labs, Snapshot is an off-chain, gasless, DAO discussion forum that makes democratic governance easy and accessible for everyone. Messages and votes are permanently stored using the Arweave + IPFS bridge so communities on Snapshot will have access to their records forever. Read more about the Snapshot integration here.
Font Community
Font.community — the decentralised NFT marketplace for fonts — has recently announced they are utilising Arweave as their storage layer. Using Font Community, creators can buy, sell, and tokenize fonts, borrow money, earn interest, and transfer ownership — all with few easy steps. Currently, Font Community has ~2500 font creators who’ve created around 50,000 premium fonts worldwide. Find out more about why Font Community chose Arweave as their storage layer in this blog post.
Koi
Koi is a data-layer protocol working to build an open-source library for the future, whilst acting as an attention-based incentive mechanism to reward contributions to the permaweb. By integrating PSTs, the Koi profit sharing community can be expanded to incentivise content creation anywhere that data can be stored immutably. Read more about Koi here.
Permanent Archives
Permanent Archives is working to capture important political and historical information on the permaweb. Their first dataset was archived in January 2021, as a result of the riots that occurred in the US Capitol Building on 6th January 2021. It contains 12GB of raw Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch streams, pictures and movies, which can be accessed by logging into app.ardrive.io and attaching this drive ID: afa4f6e1–2401–46e1-ae2e-0d84926394e9. Follow along with the project’s work on Twitter.
Arweave News
A group of Arweave community members have created their very own Arweave news platform! Check out the latest news here, and follow them on Twitter.
Bitsear.ch
It is now possible to search the permaweb using Bitsear.ch, a search engine that fetches and displays archived content on the permaweb. Head over to bitsear.ch now and start exploring the archives!
SOLAR Bridge
The SOLAR interoperability bridge, built by Bering Waters, ensures that the massive amounts of blockchain data produced by Solana’s network is never lost or altered. Read more about SOLAR in our blog post here.
Decent.Land
Decent.Land, a new type of social media platform on the permaweb, has recently begun development. You can sign up for the waitlist here, and follow the project on Twitter in the meantime!
ApeBets
Following recent upheaval related to r/wallstreetbets and $GME, many raised concerns about how centralised and at-risk of censorship both Reddit and Discord are — the originating hubs of this movement. As a response, development immediately began on ApeBets — an unstoppable, decentralised alternative to Discord & Reddit, which will utilise Arweave, Ethereum, and Solana. You can follow ApeBets on Twitter, and sign up here.
Mirror
Mirror is a writing and publishing platform geared towards the unique needs of authors themselves. Decentralised and user-owned, Mirror utilises Arweave’s profit sharing community technology to ensure that writers are rewarded based on the content they create.
Community member Anish Agnihotri (creator of the permaweb’s own weave.email) also created a Twitter bot you can follow if you want to be notified every time a post is added to Mirror!
CopperHQ
CopperHQ provide institutional custody and acquisition of digital assets, and they are now onboarding the first institutional clients for their custom-built AR custodial solution.
ARCA DAO
The ARCA DAO is in the process of funding Arca Ventures, an additional branch of the organisation that runs parallel to the main ARCA DAO. Arca Ventures will specifically focus on investing in Profit Sharing Communities and rather than adopting a traditional investment model, ARCA aims to have a ‘hands-on’ involvement with PSC-integrated applications. Follow the latest updates from ARCA DAO here.
Hack & Tell Podcast
Tune into our very own Hack & Tell podcast series, as Arweave Founder Sam Williams catches up with builders and entrepreneurs who are currently building and integrating decentralised web applications on the permaweb. In the latest episodes, Sam speaks with Solana CEO & founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Tate Berenbaum: co-Founder of Nest.land, and Dennison Bertram — founder of DappHero. Subscribe now to stay updated and get notified when new episodes are published!
Initiatives
Polkadot <> Arweave Archival Bridge-Building Bounty
Last week we happily announced that Arweave is collaborating with Parity Technologies to launch a brand new grant for the creation of an interoperability bridge connecting Polkadot parachains with the Arweave network! The grant is valued at $7,500 (in USDC), and will ensure that vital parachain data is reliably available, remaining verifiably unchanged far into the future. Check out the details here on Gitcoin.
Call for Founders: A stock market for anything
It’s the last week to submit work for our most recent Call for Founders investment opportunity on Gitcoin, the deadline being the 8th of Feb. If you have an idea for a permaweb dapp that would be suitable for tokenising royalty streams, you should read up on the opportunity here! Submissions can be anything from an online book store, article publishing platform, music service, a platform for visual artworks, or any other suitable platform you can create.
Network
A recent update to the core Arweave protocol, Arweave 2.3, has introduced a raft of improvements. For new miners, synchronising with the blockweave is now faster, meaning they can get started contributing to the permaweb and receiving rewards even sooner! Mining nodes will also handle limited disk space more effectively, which is becoming even more important as the total data stored on the network rapidly grows. The core dev team has also laid the groundwork for the introduction of the new mining algorithm — Succinct Random Proofs of Access (SPoRAs).
SmartWeave
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! The SmartWeave UI has also been much improved. To check out the new Smartweave features, update your SmartWeave.js and start using it now.
On top of these improvements by the Arweave core team, community member Al Morris has iterated further on the SmartWeave protocol, allowing for essentially limitless SmartWeave interactions per Arweave block! To learn more about the wide-reaching benefits this brings, and how to utilise this, check out this Twitter thread from Arweave Founder Sam Williams highlighting Al’s work.
Plus — uwu, a brand new, safe language for developers writing SmartWeave code is currently being finalised and documented!
In the wild
New York Times — They Found a Way to Limit Big Tech’s Power: Using the Design of Bitcoin, by Nathaniel Popper: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/technology/big-tech-power-bitcoin.html
World Economic Forum report — Crypto, What Is It Good For? An Overview of Cryptocurrency Use Cases: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Cryptocurrency_Uses_Cases_2020.pdf
CoinDesk — Why Everyone From Square to Facebook Is Now Hosting the Bitcoin White Paper: https://www.coindesk.com/why-everyone-from-square-to-facebook-is-now-hosting-the-bitcoin-white-paper
What is Arweave? A write-up and explainer article from the ArDrive team: https://ardrive.io/what-is-arweave/
What is Arweave? A Chinese-language explainer article for Arweave: http://niubiquan.com/article/6122
See you on the permaweb!
-arweave-team
