What is Arweave and what does it do?

Arweave is a blockchain built for permanent data storage. Instead of renting space month by month, you pay once in its AR token to upload a file, and the network is designed to keep copies of it for the long term. The collection of websites and apps stored this way is often called the permaweb.

What does Arweave do?

Arweave's docs describe it as a global network of computers that together store many copies of all data uploaded to it. Each new block accepts new data and also checks that miners still hold older data.

The pricing model is the unusual part. Uploaders pay a small fee plus a contribution to a storage endowment. The fee is set to cover about 200 years of replicated storage at current prices. The endowment is meant to cover future costs as long as storage keeps getting cheaper over time, which the docs say has averaged about 38.5% a year over the past 50 years. This is a design assumption, not a guarantee.

For a different approach to decentralized storage, see our guide to Filecoin.

What blockchain is Arweave on?

Arweave is not a token on another chain. It is its own layer 1 blockchain, which ar.io describes as able to validate and finalize transactions without relying on another network. The mainnet launched on June 8, 2018, and Sam Williams is credited as its founder.

Its structure is called a blockweave. In the original design, each block links to the previous block and also to a randomly chosen older "recall block." Miners must have that older data to mine, so they are rewarded for storing history. Today the protocol uses a system called SPoRA, where miners prove access to random 256 KiB chunks of stored data, and a timing mechanism keeps ordinary hard drives competitive.

What is the Arweave token used for?

AR is the network's native token. It is used to pay upload fees, and part of each fee goes to the miner who includes the transaction while the rest goes to the endowment. Miners earn AR through fees, a block reward that shrinks over time and, if needed, payouts from the endowment.

The yellow paper set a maximum supply of 66 million AR, with 55 million created at launch and 11 million released gradually as mining rewards.

What is arweave.net?

Arweave miners store and share data among themselves, but they have no direct reason to serve it to everyday users. Gateways fill that gap. According to ar.io, the Arweave team launched arweave.net as a gateway run as a community good. It caches and indexes stored data so a web browser can load it from a normal web address.

Relying on one gateway created a bottleneck, so the ar.io network now supports many independent gateways that serve, cache and index Arweave data.