Arweave Update: A Maturing Storage Solution In Web3

This article is an update on the Arweave project and its current happenings and related projects if you are interested in a more in-depth look at some of the underlying mechanisms and incentives that make Arweave possible please reference our previous Arweave post.

Introduction

There are currently a few decentralized storage offers such as FileCoin, Sia, Storj, and Arweave. Arweave is uniquely positioned in the space when compared to the others in two ways: its payment model and its promise of data permanence (data will persist forever). Arweave embraces the mentality that a user should be able to “pay once and store forever”. While this philosophy may seem somewhat illogical, thanks to the rate at which the price of storage is decreasing it turns out to be a viable solution (if you are interested the previous Arweave post has a section regarding this). Arweave envisions a future where the “history” of the internet is no longer being trivially censored or altered by centralized entities to tell a specific narrative or make the truth murky.

The centralization concerns on data storage such as censorship or a single-point of failure are not limited to web2. With the boom that NFTs have seen in the past year, one would probably be shocked to find that some blue-chip projects, such as Cool Cats, still use a centralized storage option and operate with a clear single point of failure. While these NFT owners are not at risk of losing the pointers they have paid for and secured via the blockchain all the data that it points to can easily be wiped clean essentially devaluing their NFT to $0. Additionally, as the NFT space evolves and more complex forms of NFTs become prevalent, such as “living NFTs” or NFTs that change their metadata as time moves forward based on certain criteria or user actions, ensuring an honest history will be important to ensure project trust and support.

As a final remark in this section, it is important to note that due to Arweave’s unique offering when compared to other web3 storage solutions, there is plenty of room for Arweave and these other offerings to coexist and perhaps work together synergistically. Arweave may be able to operate as a platform for other storage providers to offload data that needs to be stored forever while they still house and manage additional data that doesn’t necessarily need to persist for eternity.

Arweave Growth to Date

At the time of this article’s posting the Arweave weave has grown to over 65 TB of data; an impressive 8x increase since our previous Arweave report back in April 2021. More importantly, as can be seen, the growth rate of the weave suddenly chang