Arweave News: March
Grants & Funding
Last month we announced additional funding of $8.3 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, plus new funding from Coinbase Ventures. We are reinvesting these funds directly into Arweave’s community of buidlers, starting with Arweave Boost and Arweave Grants. The submission process is open and we are accepting applications for your amazing permaweb project ideas. USV even compiled an exciting list of what they would like to see built on Arweave.
Here are some of the grants we are currently funding:
- Weiblocked: A censorship-resistant archive of censored posts from China’s Weibo. By @samrahimi.
- Feedweave: A decentralised social network and blogging platform. By @Literature.
- The ARCA DAO: A community run DAO that works to build permaweb apps and improve the Arweave ecosystem. By many.
- Arweave-over-HF: Transport layer redundancy for the Arweave protocol. By @garrett.
- GitWeave: Decentralised, immutable, and verifiable code repositories built on the Arweave network. By @SystemWizard.
Head over to https://www.arweave.org/get-involved/grants-funding to get involved now!
New on the permaweb
In recent global events concerning the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese media has seen heightened efforts to censor news and information surrounding the virus. In an effort to combat this censorship, developer and Arweave community member Sam Rahimi set out on a mission to document COVID-19 information on the permaweb, by creating the Daily Corona Archives — a simple dashboard that lets you view the daily statistics for each region, going back to mid-January, when the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China first became public knowledge.
We caught up with Sam to hear more about his motivations on creating this archive, where his archiving projects are in the development process, and what Sam envisions for the future of archiving censored media. Head over to our blog to read the full interview.
When we discovered Sam Rahimi’s Corona Archives, we decided to team up and work together on another project: WeiBlocked. Still in its early stages, WeiBlocked auto-archives potentially vulnerable content from the Chinese social network Weibo. Weibo has recently been in the news for hiring thousands of new content censors, helping to suppress information about the spread of the coronavirus, and clamping down on trends such as #IWantFreeSpech on their platform. Together with Sam Rahimi, we have built a tool that helps people archive, record, and automatically discover which content is being censored or deleted, and easily access it on the permaweb: https://weibo-uncensored.github.io/
Community initiatives
Active hackathons:
Prize: 100 DAI
This hackathon is to build and run a bot that will archive block hashes and block headers from other blockchains on the Permaweb, providing a permanent history of blocks and fork events. After the first month, you can continue to earn a prize for each consecutive month until the bounty ends. Head over to the GitHub issue to find out more.
Stay tuned for more upcoming hackathons on our GitHub portal.
ARCA DAO
We caught up with members of the ARCA DAO to find out what they’ve been up to since the launch of our very first community-governed DAO. Their first few weeks were mostly organisational: assigning roles and coordinating tasks.
This month, they have updated us with the following:
- Public sign up form
- Public grant application (2500 DAI has been granted to one applicant)
- ARX: AR stablecoin experiment on Ethereum, already available on Uniswap
- ARCA community gateway discussion is ongoing
- PermaSnap: a photo-sharing application that has been granted funding of 2055 DAI is currently making progress, follow the project on GitHub
The ARCA DAO is currently accepting new members, and are looking for people who are skilled in the fields of marketing and design. To participate in the DAO, head over to the arca-dao Discord channel.
Network
After a huge amount of work from Arweave’s core developers, Arweave 2.0 has officially been released! This protocol upgrade includes new ‘bundled’ transactions and Arweave’s new fast-write system, much improving Arweave’s data storage capacity and write speed. In short, Arweave 2.0 will allow us (at a storage protocol-level) to scale to sizes far exceeding that of the traditional web. The 2.0 hard fork will activate on approximately the 9th of April — if you are an Arweave miner, remember to upgrade your nodes!
Community spotlight
Get to know more about the people behind the hacking and learn what motivates our community of developers to join, build, and share their creations within the permaweb. In our latest series you can meet Antonio: BUIDLR of Bookweave, a platform that is currently archiving collections from Project Gutenberg.
If you’re a permaweb developer and would like to take part in our upcoming community spotlight series, drop us a line!
Arweave in the wild
TechCrunch — Arweave’s Permaweb stops coronavirus censorship, raises $8M: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/coronavirus-censorship-arweave/
Arweave featured on Business Insider — decentralized ‘permaweb’ is fighting coronavirus misinformation in China: https://www.businessinsider.com/arweave-tech-startup-with-andreessen-horowitz-funding-stops-censorship-2020-3?
Business Insider ’10 things in tech you need to know today’: https://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-in-tech-you-need-to-know-today-march-30-2020?
Forbes crypto describing Arweave as the “permanent Library of Alexandria”: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhaley/2020/03/16/arweaves-permanent-library-of-alexandria-on-blockchain-to-halt-censorship-empower-information/#4be8b3616383
Arweave’s censorship-resistance mentioned in VICE news: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kz7ad/china-just-outlawed-clickbait-and-sensationalist-headlines
See you on the permaweb!
-arweave-team
