Arweave Q1 2021 Ecosystem Update: NFTs, The Guardian, a new web wallet, new gateway, & much more!

10 min readApr 12, 2021

This quarter has been astronomically busy for the whole Arweave ecosystem! In March alone, the network handled over 1 million transactions, and the storage endowment grew to over $550,000. The latest incubator programme, the Open Web Foundry, came to a close last week with over 500 participants. Plus, we have a raft of fantastic updates to share from the vibrant network of founders, including: Arweave’s unique offering for NFTs being showcased in the Guardian, the creation of atomic NFTs, ArConnect — a new MetaMask-style AR web wallet from the Verto team, and much, much more.

There’s been so much activity so far in 2021, we’re trialling a stripped-down version of this ecosystem update! Give us your feedback here.

Profit Sharing Community Updates

The Verto.Exchange team: Leading profit sharing token exchange

Launch of ArConnect, a simple and secure wallet management tool, including an ‘allowances’ feature providing a sleek, efficient web wallet experience.
Introduction of an Ethereum<>AR bridge on Verto.Exchange
Launch of Verto Space, an application to browse and trade NFTs with built-in attention rewards powered by the Koi protocol. Check out a tutorial here.
Completion of Verto’s pre-seed fundraising round. Congratulations to the team!
Introduction of $QUAD.vision, a social network protocol focused on encouraging and growing meaningful social interactions on the permaweb. Learn how and why this was created from Verto Founder Tate Berenbaum.
$QUAD.vision also provides a mechanism for community votes to indicate which version of a permaweb dapp a domain should point to. Check out cFrame here to learn more.

community.XYZ: The profit sharing communities hub

Over 70 profit sharing communities, and over 1000 atomic NFTs now call cXYZ home!
Radical improvements in loading speed and UX, including significantly reduced fees and increased usability and transparency.

ArDrive: Offering permanent, immutable file storage

Launch of ArDrive web version 1.0.1, including mobile support
Release and approval of the first ArDrive Community Improvement Proposal
Team size growing to 10 full-time and part-time core ArDrivers
Collaboration and integration with Mask Network
Cited in the World Economic Forum Best Blockchain Use Cases 2020
Formed a partnership with 247rack.com to host ArDrive gateway and node servers

ArVerify: The ‘blue tick for the permaweb’

Launch of the ArVerify tool, providing a ‘blue tick for the permaweb’
An explosion of activity post-launch of ArVerify, leading to over 5,500 verifications so far
Over $15k in profits distributed automatically to holders of ArVerify’s profit sharing token so far this year
Implementation of ArVerify with the ArConnect wallet from the Verto team

ArGo: Deploy to the permaweb in just one click

Over 250 dapps and communities have been deployed using ArGo, by more than 200 users
ArGo is awarded funds from Gitcoin Grants to support their work
Partnership with Polygon (previously Matic), integrating ArGo’s permanent hosting solutions
Custom domain support is now available for your ArGo-deployed apps & sites
Many new features, including nextJS deployment integration, and streamlined redeployment processes

fQR Weave: The permaweb’s immutable anti-counterfeiting solution

New ‘Bring a Generator’ bounty programme
New release of the fQR Weave SDK
Many 1000s of fQR codes generated and integrated so far

Evermore: A powerful permaweb-based file storage tool

Release of the Evermore app for MacOS, and a mobile-friendly web app, resulting in hundreds of new users
After becoming the first Arweave-based app to support minting & managing NFTs of all types (including music, images, & video), over 500 NFTs have been uploaded via Evermore to date.
Learn more about the Evermore PSC and token here

ArweaveNews: A community-run news service for the Arweave ecosystem

ArweaveNews has been transformed into a profit sharing community
Launch of the ArweaveNews RSS feed
Held an on-chain AMA interview with Tate Berenbaum, the Founder of Verto.Exchange, and another with fQR Weave.
The next on-chain AMA will be with the Pianity team — and you can contribute your questions now here
Conducted traditional AMA interviews with the teams behind ArDrive, Ecclesia, and decent.land
Follow along with the latest ArweaveNews on these platforms

The Koi Protocol: A new framework for decentralized permaweb services

Powering the trading of NFTs and attention rewards on top of the Arweave network with koi.rocks, in collaboration with the Verto team.
Koi Founder Al Morris appeared on a panel at Outlier Ventures’ Diffusion Digital conference with Arweave Founder Sam Williams, Rumi Morales of Outlier Ventures, and Jarrod Dicker of the Washington Post to discuss attention rewards and the future web.
Koi also recently closed their pre-seed fundraising round — congratulations to the team!

Pianity: Connecting artists, fans, and buyers by building permanent music NFTs

Became the first project to bring atomic NFTs to the music space (atomic NFTs have permanent, on-chain assets, and no external metadata, and are contained within one address). Learn why atomic NFTs are so important here.
Successfully completed the first NFT auctions of music tracks on Pianity.

Decent.Land: A permaweb-based social network protocol

Currently in alpha development, with version 1.1.2 released recently
Each post using decent.land is now an NFT! Learn more here.
Release of the decentland-js library
Featured by HotNewCrypto, creating an explosion of new users
The team is creating a new caching system with the potential to be extended into an oracle.
Originally inspired by the PublicSquare protocol proposal, decent.land now also boasts integration with $QUAD.vision and also with ArVerify

everFinance: A layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum with virtually gasless transactions using Arweave

The recent beta launch of everPay, which is ETH-compatible.
Read this piece for an analysis and comparison of zkSync, xDai, and how they measure up to everPay.

New on the Permaweb

Ecclesia: A social media platform focused on free speech

While the app is currently in development, the Ecclesia team gave an on-chain AMA with the ArweaveNews team, laying out their future plans and current progress.
Release of a video preview of the future Ecclesia UI
Follow EcclesiaSpeech on Twitter for upcoming releases

Arcade City: Decentralizing the gig economy

Arcade City, in operation for >5 years, recently migrated to the Arweave network, and is now a profit sharing community
Integration with Verto.Exchange — view their profit sharing token here

Litentry: Web3.0 cross-chain identity aggregation protocol

Integration with Arweave as Litentry’s data storage layer to ensure immutable, reliable data storage for all Litentry users
An AMA with the ArweaveNews team giving insights into what’s next for the project.

Non-Fungible Tokens & Arweave

The world is beginning to wake up to the incredible potential of Arweave + NFTs! Read more about why this is such a powerful combination in this Twitter thread and blog post from the core team. Arweave’s unique offering to the NFT economy is also outlined in this recent Guardian article.

If you have an NFT project you want to bring to Arweave, consider applying for the Arweave Grants programme, or reaching out to us via email.

Atomic NFTs

New this quarter to the Arweave ecosystem are atomic NFTs. That is, NFTs that have permanent, on-chain assets, no external metadata, and are contained within one Arweave address! Whether you’re using the arweave.net gateway to view the assets of an NFT, or telling a SmartWeave contract where to locate an NFT, with atomic NFTs on Arweave, the location for both tasks is the same. Read more about atomic NFTs here — the technology is a huge boon to NFT creators and collectors alike, ensuring that your assets will be accessible forever, and that they will not ever be dissociated from their metadata.

Hashmasks: A living NFT collection created in collaboration with >70 artists

This fantastic NFT digital art collection has officially migrated to using Arweave for permanent storage of its stunning images! This ensures that any Hashmasks owned will never be at risk of their associated art being lost.
All 16,384 Hashmasks are now stored on Arweave, forever — you can read about why and how here in this blog by the Hashmasks team.

1111 by Kevin Abosch: Arweave permanent storage in action

Digital artist Kevin Abosch recently released 1111, a collection of 1,111 digital artworks, via OpenSea.
Every artwork is also an NFT, and each NFT’s assets and metadata is stored on Arweave, ensuring they are permanently preserved, forever.
Additionally, every single artwork in this collection is also a profit sharing community! For example, here is the community page for piece 1111 #0537, and here is the image itself.
Each piece sold earns OpenKoi profit sharing tokens.

Other NFT projects recently migrating to or minted on Arweave include:

KodaDot, the community-owned NFT marketplace, has integrated support for Arweave.
CheckMyNFT.com recently launched, providing a way for users to check whether their NFT’s assets & metadata are stored immutably on Arweave or not. Their recent audit highlighted the real risks of failing to store this data on Arweave.
Kreechures: All NFT art will be permanently stored on Arweave.
Crypteriors: The team recently minted their NFT provenance record on Arweave.
SpaceBudz: All NFT art & metadata will be stored on Arweave.
CryptoSeals: This 10,000-piece NFT collection by @memorycollect0r will be stored in its entirety on Arweave.

Arweave Network & Protocol Updates

Arweave 2.4.0.0, 2.4.0.1, & Succinct Proofs Of Random Access (SPoRA)

The SPoRA consensus mechanism upgrade for Arweave was released in February, plus another follow-up release.
SPoRA brings a raft of protocol improvements, including dramatically increased data replications across the network, and improvd mining efficiency.
Read the full SPoRA release blog post here, or check out this Twitter thread.

TestWeave

A new local testnet for Arweave has been released, with the core node development providing this docker
When setup, the testnet provides a full gateway and Arweave node on your local machine, also allowing you to query the testnet with GraphQL
TestWeave provides an SDK that you can install using NPM

SmartWeave

Release of a new, powerful modification patch to SmartWeave by John Letey, enabling embedding of smart contracts into any SmartWeave asset.
It’s now possible to turn web pages, images, videos, audio, or any other data on the new web into a profit sharing token or NFT, which can then be traded on Verto.Exchange.
The SmartWeave CLI UX has been entirely redesigned
SmartWeave now supports web extension-based wallets. Check out the repo here.
Fabian Riewe, of the ArVerify team, recently created a testing library for Smartweave.
Arweave Developer Advocate & communityXYZ Founder Cedrik Boudreau released two excellent how-to guides for building SmartWeave contracts, you can read them here and here.

Amplify: A faster, more powerful gateway implementation for Arweave

The Amplify gateway is now officially live!
The latest Amplify release is v0.8.0, including GraphQL support, and streaming from the weave
Check out the Amplify roadmap here for features coming soon

ArweaveJS

New version of ArweaveJS now offers support for ArConnect, the new Metamask-style wallet from the Verto.Exchange team
As of March, over 500 apps and packages now depend on ArweaveJS!

ArDB: Stop writing GraphQL requests by hand!

Arweave Developer Advocate & communityXYZ Founder Cedrik Boudreau has released ArDB, making it faster & easier to perform GraphQL queries. Check it out here.

uwu: A new safe language for writing SmartWeave contracts

The team behind Verto.Exchange created uwu in a community livestream
uwu allows for creation of a fully-functional NFT contract in ~40 lines of safer, JS-familiar code in only ~15 minutes!
Learn more in this presentation from @undefined_void, and in this article from ArweaveNews.

In the Wild

Podcasts

Arweave Founder Sam Williams has appeared on multiple podcasts this quarter, you can listen at the links here:

The CoinGecko podcast with Bobby Ong, where we dive deep into Arweave, our use cases, ArDrive, and more.
The FTX podcast, where Sam discusses Arweave, scalability, the SPoRA consensus mechanism, profit sharing communities and more.
The Outlier Ventures podcast, where Sam presents the case for a permaweb.
The Coinscrum Meet The Founders podcast, where Sam discusses UX, mining, and what’s next for Arweave.
Plus, Arweave was mentioned in the BBC Business Daily podcast on the topic of NFTs and the permanence of digital art.

Articles

NFTs are helping artists solve a vital problem: who owns digital artwork? | The Guardian — https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/apr/03/non-fungible-tokens-digital-art-artists

Yes, Your NFTs Can Go Missing — Here’s What You Can Do About It | Decrypt - https://decrypt.co/62037/missing-or-stolen-nfts-how-to-protect

NFT Immutability Debate Grows as Tokenized Tweets Get Deleted and NFT Images Are Replaced | Bitcoin.com — https://news.bitcoin.com/nft-immutability-debate-grows-as-tokenized-tweets-get-deleted-and-nft-images-are-replaced/

It’s an NFT Boom. Do You Know Where Your Digital Art Lives? | How Arweave supports NFTs | CoinDesk — https://www.coindesk.com/its-an-nft-boom-do-you-know-where-your-digital-art-lives

Arweave vs Filecoin | How do the two protocols differ, and why? | From the ArDrive team — https://ardrive.io/arweave-vs-filecoin/

Arweave Introduces New Consensus “SPoRA” — https://tokenpost.com/Arweave-Introduces-New-Consensus-SPoRA-6729

Exploring Solana and the SOL Token — Ivan on Tech | The Arweave <> Solana SOLAR bridge — https://academy.ivanontech.com/blog/exploring-solana-and-the-sol-token

Web3 ELI5: What is Web3? | Arweave’s role for storage in Web3- https://messari.io/article/web3-eli5-what-is-web3

Advanced Blockchain AG Has Invested In Permanent Data Storage Provider, Arweave — https://blog.advancedblockchain.com/advanced-blockchain-ag-has-invested-in-permanent-data-storage-provider-arweave/

Version One Ventures invests in Arweave -

https://versionone.vc/announcing-our-investment-in-arweave/

https://www.chainnews.com/news/392522406744.htm

Ternoa Blockchain — Immortalizing Memories and Data | Ternoa utilises Arweave for immutable storage — https://www.altcoinbuzz.io/reviews/altcoin-projects/ternoa-blockchain-immortalizing-memories-and-data/

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What an amazing start to the year! Be sure to follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest news as it happens, and if you’re a developer, join us on Discord, where we have over 5,500 developers waiting to chat and collaborate with you. Also, if you’ve not yet joined the unofficial @Arweavers Telegram group for Arweave-related chat, join the conversation here.

See you on the permaweb!

-arweave-team