Arweave
Arweave (previously known as Archain) is a blockchain-based platform that provides scalable low-cost on-chain data storage.
Arweave aims to deliver a global, permanent hard drive on a new kind of blockchain. If successful it may enable high throughput, decentralized, immutable, and most importantly, low cost data storage. The team consists of current PhD computer science candidates out of the University of Kent who joined the TechStars Berlin 2018 accelerator program under the name Archain (since renamed to avoid confusion with other projects such as Rchain and Achain). When you read down to the Team and Advisors section you’ll see both the University of Kent and TechStars fingerprints all over this project. TechStars is an incubator to look out for, they produced another hyped cryptocurrency project: Loom Network (TechStars NY). The team publishes on Medium often so it is easy to follow along the history of the project from their pre-TechStars to post-TechStars days. There is a clear graduation from a university-based project to a “cryptocurrency” project flushed with advisors and a marketing machine behind it as you read through their posts. That clear growth to me indicates a maturing team and the ideas behind underlying this project.
Arweave is based on four layers (technologies) that operate together to create a highly-scalable (5000 TPS), permanent storage that costs considerably lower than most of the existing competition:
Blockweave is the blockchain structure behind Arweave’s project that allows for a low cost on-chain storage. As the amount of data stored increases, the amount of hashing needed for consensus decreases, which reduces the cost of storing data. The main benefits of storing data on-chain is that it becomes part of the consensus mechanism, but most importantly, it gives Arweave’s users the ability to pay once and store forever.
Proof of Access: a new consensus mechanism. Instead of competing who can solve puzzles (tasks) and use exponential amount of electricity (as in common PoW consensus mechanism), miners will compete who can replicate the most data, which assures that the energy (electricity) used while mining will decrease over time.
Wildfire- it’s an incentive mechanism that stimulates miners to share date with each other. The faster data is stored and shared with other miners in the network, the easier it will be for a miner to build positive reputation. As nodes in blockweave networks require fast access to data in order to mine in an efficient way, they are incentivized to share data to other members of the network quickly and continuously, autonomously improving the sharing experience by making it much faster.
Blockshadows: Arweave’s goal is to create long-term on-chain data storage and to make that possible, the network has to support unlimited sized blocks. Arweave uses a system that decouples transaction distribution from that of block distribution in the network. Only a “shadow”(important basic information like transaction hashes, wallet list hash) of the block is moved around the system instead of the full block itself. This allows for higher speed and scalability topping at around 5000 transactions per second. Think of shadow blocks as blocks that contain valuable, yet very low in size, information that can be moved in the system allowing for high speed and no congestion.
Token Metrics
Ticker: AR, known as AR.cash
Token Sales: The dates are not public but there will be a public sale prior to their mainnet launch on June 8th.
Utility: payment for information to be permanently archived on the Arweave. These token payments are distributed as rewards to the ‘miners’ who choose to store and maintain the information on the Arweave.
Token Type: AR is not an ERC20 token. It resides on its own chain and therefore will not be compatible with MEW and MyCrypto.
55m from genesis block and 11m for mining. Privacy and public sale details aren’t out yet
Team:
Team of 8 with 5 devs. The founding team is inexperienced with most of the them being fresh graduates. Nothing impressive. Some decent advisors-Manager at Opera, Managing Director at Techstars, Head of Growth at Quantstamp.
Co-Founder&CEO:Sam Williams, Education: PhD, Computer Science at University of Kent (373rd World). Assistant Lecturer at University of Kent, CEO&Co-founder of Minimum Spanning technologies
Co-Foudner&CTO: William Jones, Education: PhD, Computer Science at University of Kent, CTO&Co-founder of Minimum Spanning Technologies(present)-nothing found, Assistant Lecturer at University of Kent
CCO&Deisgner: India Raybould, Education: BS, Psychology, University of Manchester. Psychology student advisor at Canterbury Christ Church University
Developer’s Team Highlights: PHP dev at boohoo.com (large UK-based online fashion retailer), Head of Blockchain Solutions at The Vanbex Group (company specialized in consulting, communications & development for global blockchain businesses)
Advisors:
Anthony Ryan: Head of Growth at Quantstamp
Jesper Noehr: Project Manager Opera (1y in 2006–2007)
Jeremy Epstein: VP-Marketing&Social Navigator at Sprinklr (large company), Cargill (large international food producer and marketer)
Rob Johnson: Managing Director at Techstars
Bruno De Sousa: Head of Business Development of Cargill
Julian Lenz: Techstars mentor, and a crypto investor since 2013. Nothing found on LinkedIn
Fabian Dudek: Entrepreneur. Founder of nestpick (aggregator platform for midterm, furnished rentals-received 13 million USD funding), GlassDollar, Entrepreneur in Residence at Techstars
Christian Eggert: Tech entrepreneur of Bonativo (german food delivery company — 3.2 million EUR funding) and MINODES( platform of Consumer Analytics and Marketing Services, received 7.6 million EUR, acquired by Telefónica NEXT)
Partners:
Techstars (large seed accelerator) -Arweave is officially a member of the TechStars Berlin city 2018 startup accelerator programme. Techstars also invested in the project
Upvest: Platform to purchase, store and trade cryptographic tokens.Responsible for the ICO process
Northblock:Providing consultancy and advisory services to the project
Shelf Network -Protocol as a platform to offer multi merchant auctioning. They will use Arweave’s data structure to store auction listings
Charité –One of the largest university hospitals in Europe. Arweave will be collaborating with biomedical scientists from Charité to create a new open access scientific journal.The Journal of Raw Data will be an online-only open access peer-reviewed biomedical data journal, utilizing the Arweave network for truly permanent data storage
Pluses:
Data storage economy is expected to continue growing in a very fast pace
Active and good Github presentation, mainenet is launching on 8th of June
Solid partnerships and advisors
Low cap and and decent market awareness
Minuses:
Most of the core team members are fresh graduates
Saturated space with strong competition
Lack of important information like roadmap, whitepaper and detailed token metrics and more
For more information:
website:https://arweave.org/
telegram: https://t.me/arweave
twitter: https://twitter.com/ArweaveTeam
github: https://github.com/ArweaveTeam/arweave
lightpaper: https://arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf
hope you like it!