Arweave Network Launch Report

The Arweave Project
3 min readJul 13, 2018

It’s a success… Welcome to Arweave!

We wanted to say a big thank you to everyone that was involved in getting Arweave mainnet off the ground!

We realise that our community is the number one reason for success or failure in distributed networks, so unlike a lot of sales who just let in institutional backers, we opened multiple rounds to our dedicated and dynamic community.

Just before the sale we had over 15,000 people complete a double opt-in process for the whitelist to purchase AR tokens from a total whitelist of over 30,000 unique people.

1,800 hand-picked participants from over 150 countries.

Because we decided to do a small sale we offered allocations to a mix of institutional token buyers and community members, all of whom can help us and support the project over the long term.

This was especially important given the fact we had a small amount of tokens available, and 30,000 people trying to purchase them!

Given the very high demand for tokens, we decided to implement a multi-step application process to determine who was going to be able to drive adoption and utility for the Arweave ecosystem.

We’re lucky enough to have a highly engaged and creative community that contributed some amazing ideas about how they wanted to use the Arweave. We had people creating Arweave graffiti, Arweave dApp creators building prototype applications, and archivists digitising vintage Soviet magazines and newspapers that were thought to be have been gone forever!

One user spread the word about Arweave in a unique way!

Another of our favourite submissions was from Brian and his family from South Africa, who shared with us their deep desire to permanently preserve Brian’s grandfather’s war diaries on the Arweave. This will also be part of our upcoming community stories that we will be releasing.

In addition to individual community members, we are proud to have brought a wide array of great institutional partners, as well as some very influential individuals in the space who will all be helping Arweave out for the long term.

These include 1kx, JD Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, KuCoin Capital, Connect Capital, iAngels, Signum, Factblock, GBIC, Bixin, Nirvana, AlphaBlock, Coefficient Ventures, Block0, Columbus, Juno Capital, 160 Capital, QCP Capital, One Block, Chainfund Capital, and TLDR, to name just a few. As well as some very influential individuals in the space.

Every single decision we make is focused on the long-term.

Now, many of you may want to read that sentence again because it’s core to how we operate.

The road to success is long, which many people will overlook. Sometimes we’re going to make decisions as a company that may not make sense for the short term community members, but are the best decisions for the project over the long term. This may not make sense all the time to some people, however this is our approach.

This long term value creation endeavour will be fundamental to our long term success, and our decisions will be weighed based on a community first approach.

We must remind everyone that this a new world. Since Arweave was founded we’ve learnt a lot about decentralised networks and we will be continuing to innovate in the future. In the front of our minds is the need to move quickly and be ahead of the pack, just as we have been by launching mainnet so promptly and before most other networks.

We are thrilled that you are joining us on our journey into the future, for the many years and decades to come.

To keep up to date with all the latest Arweave developments, join our announcements channel here on Telegram.

-arweave-team

--

--

The Arweave Project

A novel data storage blockchain protocol enabling a permanent serverless web and creating truly permanent data storage for the first time.