The permaweb of Arweave is not private; all data is permanently visible and directly accessible. As a result, it is unsuitable for storing personally identifiable or sensitive data. Its initial storage costs, which begin at more than 40 years, are significantly higher than those of existing solutions.
To store files on Arweave, for example, developers create a transaction in which they pay a certain number of AR tokens as a network fee (currently $0.01/MB) to store data in perpetuity.
Simultaneously, Amazon S3’s entry-level package costs $0.000023/MB per month. Each Arweave user will have to wait 40 years to break even. This means that Arweave users pay a premium for long-term storage.
Arweave Application Instances
- A layer of storage for on-chain data
The primary limitation of the majority of public chains is their inability to store large amounts of hypermedia data. The blockchain is a bookkeeping ledger, not a data storage ledger. Arweave has a sizable market as a storage layer for on-chain data.
- NFTs have a storage layer.
NFTs, which clearly require long-term, immutable, and publicly accessible storage, will almost certainly be a significant market segment for projects like Arweave.
- Storage of publicly accessible but sensitive content
The company or central authority can easily remove content from traditional centralized storage. For example, activists such as WikiLeaks or larger organizations akin to Wikipedia would be ideal candidates for decentralized storage.
The Growth of Arweave’s Ecosystem
When examining Arwearve’s technology development and market expansion trajectory since 2021, it’s clear that the Arwearve team has a distinct and compelling vision for its application scenarios and market strategy.
- Collaboration with the infrastructure of the Web 3.0
Cosmos, Polkadot, Avalanche, NEAR, and Solana have partnered with Arweave. The Graph, a blockchain indexing protocol, also supports Arweave, allowing users to more efficiently access archived blockchain data.
- Cooperative efforts with DeFi Projects
Arweave is being used by an increasing number of projects to store data pertaining to the cryptocurrency industry. The DeFi space has several significant use cases: Uniswap and Compound already use Arweave to host their entire front-end applications.
- Expansion of Arweave Ecosystem
Arweave has an NFT standard called Atomic NFT that allows for the permanent storage of both the asset file and metadata file on-chain, whereas other solutions only provide a one-time NFT and store the metadata file off-chain.
When developing a smart contract, developers can create a corresponding PST pass and agree that the PST holder will receive a proportional share of the contract’s future gas fees. Thus, the more a smart contract deployed on Arweave is used, the more valuable its PST tokens become intrinsically. This provides an incentive for developers.
In Brief
Arweave, the Web 3.0 storage infrastructure, is a decentralized cloud storage solution that addresses the issue of permanently storing data. Its network and application architecture enables the integration of development and data storage, ensuring data integrity across time and space.
Numerous smart contracts, particularly GameFi, place a high premium on user front-end behavior data and urgently require the data to be connected on and off the chain.
With the ecosystem’s increasing richness, Arweave has the potential to lay a solid foundation for resolving the aforementioned issues and has an excellent chance of becoming a top chain.
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