The market

The data storage and management industry.

As can be seen, the global big data industry has skyrocketed since 2011. By 2018, its market size is estimated to be $42 billion USD and projected to reach $103 billion USD in 2027.

More specifically, when categorized by segments, the revenue from the global big data software, in particular, is estimated to be $14 billion USD in 2018.

Got how big it is? Now let's look at what is going on in this industry.

The problem

From the humanity angle:

The Internet was meant to be a free space. Yet government internet control and censorship ruin it. The latest Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House - one of the most comprehensive assessments of countries’ performance regarding online freedom, has revealed some insightful findings:

Online manipulation and disinformation tactics played an important role in elections in at least 18 countries over the past year, including the United States.
Disinformation tactics contributed to a seventh consecutive year of overall decline in internet freedom, as did a rise in disruptions to mobile internet service and increases in physical and technical attacks on human rights defenders and independent media.
A record number of governments have restricted mobile internet service for political or security reasons, often in areas populated by ethnic or religious minorities.
For the third consecutive year, China was the world’s worst abuser of internet freedom, followed by Syria and Ethiopia.

Those are the illustrative data proving the poor internet freedom around the world, of which data storage and management play an important role.

From the business angle:
Big data storage capacity and management challenges are killings many companies. Along with the industry growth, those problems become more serious. Especially when the companies themselves want to store, study and exploit those data (That's why big data is huge and growing). Yet the thing is that the volume of data entering companies from different devices overwhelms their storage capacities. Moreover, when talking about studying and exploiting the data, data management is crucial. But the currently poor performance of data organizing does not allow data scientists to properly retrieve and process them in a timely manner. Some companies chose to go with traditional hardware-based storage solutions as the solution yet they take time to provision and do not show an adequate capability to fulfill the requirement of data management. Specifically, traditional storage can somehow be a bandage for structured data like spreadsheets and database tables, which is easy to classify and self-organized already. But unstructured data, which makes up 80% of new data according to Forbes, is the real pain point management becomes difficult and it doesn't seem to stop. In fact, it is growing at a rate of 62% per year and is projected to make up 93% of data by 2022.

The novel blockchain technology has brought us an awesome idea of building firm and decentralized infrastructure to withstand those digital challenges. Yet the way it is currently being implemented is not heading to its full potential.

The novel blockchain technology has brought us an awesome idea of building firm and decentralized infrastructure to withstand more digital challenges. Yet the way it is currently being implemented is not heading to its full potential. Specifically, instead of adding on-chain, the choice of permanent storage has to be sacrificed and therefore, new applications would be constructed on top of existing infrastructure to reduce the initial cost of storage establishment. This was considered as a fine option. Yes, true - yet just for a short-term period. Regarding the long-term growth, the cost of usage - of content accessing arises, persists and grows enormously along with the demand for data storage.

Therefore, the need for a decentralized low-cost data storage protocol that permanently stores that data is essential and urgent. Especially when the online world is about to bloom with the wave of the 4th Industrial Revolution and, most importantly, the blockchain hype.

The solution

The Arweave team (formerly known as the Archain) has come up with that solution: a true censorship-free new data storage protocol on a blockchain-like structure called the blockweave based on a novel Proof of Access consensus mechanism that aims to construct the scalable backbone infrastructure for the data economy providing truly permanent and low-cost on-chain data storage together with a transaction performance of 5000 TPS (transactions per second).

How?
With the blockweave solution, the amount of hashing needed for consensus decreases together with the increase of the amount of data stored in the system. Simply put, the more data is stored, the cheaper it is to conduct data storing. The PoA consensus mechanism incentivizes miners to participate in the network to provide as many replications of the data held in the system as possible.

Have a look at this video explainer for your further understanding:

Another innovative approach of the Arweave team is that they already launched their alpha testnet back in November 2017 and is about to release their mainet in a few days (June 2018) parallelly to their ICO. So that, investors would have a comprehensive look at their technical capability before investing in it. In addition, perceiving their product as "built for developers", the Arweave team has already provided the REST API for programmers to develop projects no matter which programming language they use. Here are some features apps available on the blockweave (you actually can build one yourself right now):

Team

Their team got a 10 mark of team proof on the ICO rating site ICO Marks, which shows a high credibility of their project and increases the practical potential of it in my assessment.

Social Media Presence

Apart from the achievement of nearly 30k Telegram members, their social media presence is not strong enough to me. An active community on Telegram is great yet that's not enough, integration communication should be implemented, I suggest, to raise the project awareness as well as draw more attraction for their ICO and mainnet launch.

Their youtube channel is not well-followed yet I do appreciate the effort from the CEO and CTO themselves to virtually throw meetups with the community, explain the ideas and answer questions about the project on this channel. It shows to me their dedication as well as the willingness to make something a reality.

Although it is not followed by many people, their publications uploading on Medium is also an informative and professional way of wide-spreading the project's ideas and concepts as well as establish an academic community.

Token Economics — Token sale

Token symbol: AR
ICO price: 1 AR = $0.73 USD
Accepting: ETH
Hardcap: 8,700,000 USD
Total supply: 66,000,000
Distribution for Token Sale: 20,6%
Whitelist: YES

The native AR tokens have an intrinsic value of document storage on the blockweave since it is required to make payments which are then distributed as a reward to miners, who store and maintain the information.

My thought

I have to mention again that their decision to launch the mainet alongside the ICO is a courageous one. Since criticism is just right around the corner to ruin their fundraising event. Yet they still do it, which shows their absolute confidence on their technical capability. I, therefore, have a great trust in this project.
In addition, when you invest in a project, you are investing in its people as well since they are the one making it happen or not. And I highly rate the effort and dedication of their CEO, CTO together with the team for what they have done on Telegram, Youtube and Medium.

Citations:

Statista:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/507794/germany-data-center-investment/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/254266/global-big-data-market-forecast/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/301566/big-data-factory-revenue-by-type/

Vicomnet:
http://www.vicomnet.com/top-data-storage-challenges/

Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/09/30/big-data-20-mind-boggling-facts-everyone-must-read/#1176b72217b1

Dubber:
https://www.dubber.net/unlocking-unstructured-data-voice-processing-power-zoe/

Author: Bitcointalk username: rueisnax (a.k.a. Vincentle — Le Huu Quang Vinh)
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Disclaimer: Statements on this site do not represent the views or policies of anyone other than myself. The information on this site is provided for discussion purposes only, and are not investing recommendations. Under no circumstances does this information represent a recommendation to buy or sell securities.
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[ICO Review] Arweave - Permanent and Low-cost Storage with Proof of Access Consensus