Understanding the Arweave Blockchain
Arweave is a protocol that enables permanent storage of data with a single upfront fee.
1. What is Arweave?
Arweave is a protocol that enables the permanent storage of data with a single upfront fee.
Blockchains like Bitcoin & Ethereum use linear chains of blocks.
Arweave’s core innovation is blockweave - a data structure with a web of interconnected blocks. Blockweave enables faster confirmation times & more efficient data storage.
Arweave guarantees permanent storage. It breaks data into sequential 256kb chunks and this enables extremely large data files to be easily uploaded to Arweave.
Native Token: AR
Consensus mechanism: SPoRA (Succinct Proofs of Random Access)
SPoRA incentivizes nodes to keep previous blocks available so that new blocks can be linked to them through cryptographic proofs.
2. What is Permaweb?
Permaweb is a global, permanent web of pages & apps on top of the core Arweave protocol.
Arweave offers a stack of tools for UI hosting, database writes & queries, and smart contracts for programming financial rewards & incentives.
To start using Permaweb, go to: https://permapages.app
The developer docs are here: https://cookbook.arweave.dev
3. What is Akord?
Akord is a protocol for secure storage & publishing on Arweave.
You can create an account to get 500 MB of free storage here: https://v2.akord.com/signup
Once you create a vault (encrypted or public), you can upload data to it.
This is an example of an uploaded file: https://v2.akord.com/public/vaults/active/liok58p_Hz-n2Kre57_kAW4Pc-c2O-RzW4jodGf79ks/gallery#public/9beb91ea-d6e4-4bc0-a6f0-1c7ee997d3cd
4. Interoperability
Avalanche users can pay for permanent storage on Arweave using Avalanche wallets and AVAX tokens.
Polygon users can upload data to Arweave using tokens native to Polygon.
SOLAR Bridge enables Solana ledger data to be stored on the permaweb.
Arweave+IPFS bridge enables permanent backing of data using Arweave, while also making it available in IPFS.
5. Arweave Ecosystem
Arweave has a very vibrant ecosystem as depicted in the image below: