Arweave PriceAR

What Is Arweave (AR)?

It is no exaggeration to say that the world we know today would be unimaginable without the Internet. Thanks to this breakthrough technology, people all over the world can get information immediately with the click of a button or the touch of a screen. But did you know that a few centralized organizations manage most of the information on the Internet? In fact, global technology companies and governments have enormous power to influence what we see, hear, and do on the World Wide Web (WWW).

The birth of blockchain has reversed the situation and stimulated the process of decentralization, including information storage. However, most blockchains rely on external protocols. Because storage on the chain is very expensive, it is not feasible to store a large amount of data.

In this article, we will discuss the cryptocurrency project Arweave, an innovative protocol that allows data to be permanently stored in a decentralized manner. We will also introduce the technical aspects of the AR cryptocurrency, whose price has historically been highly volatile.

What Is AR?

AR is the native token of the Arweave network. There are many use cases in the ecosystem. AR has a maximum supply of 66,000,000 tokens, of which approximately 65,652,466 AR (about 99.5% of total supply) is currently circulating. Of the maximum 66 million AR tokens, 55 million were distributed during the genesis block at the network's launch in June 2018, with the remaining 11 million AR to be introduced gradually through block mining rewards.

Arweave was co-founded by Sam Williams (CEO), a computer scientist and entrepreneur, and William Jones, whose focus was graph theory and neural networking; both were Ph.D. candidates at the University of Kent. Jones left the project in mid-2018.

In November 2019, Arweave raised US$5 million from venture capital firms; in March 2020 it raised an additional US$8.3 million from Andreessen Horowitz, USV, and Coinbase Ventures in exchange for AR tokens.

How Does Arweave Work?

To be more precise, Arweave is not a traditional blockchain. While the majority of cryptocurrencies store their data in a chain of blocks that include transactions and other information, Arweave uses a graph of blocks instead.

Arweave uses a "blockweave," a variation of blockchain technology in which each block is linked both to the block immediately prior and to a random earlier block (the recall block). Its consensus method is Proof of Access (PoA), which requires miners to supply hashes from both earlier blocks to build a new block and earn the AR block reward.

Arweave uses a consensus method called Proof of Access (PoA). The recall block is a randomly picked block from the protocol's history, calculated from the current block's hash and its modulus relative to the current block height. Miners must supply hashes from both earlier blocks to build a new block and earn the AR block reward.

The project was first announced as Archain in August 2017, rebranded to Arweave in February 2018, and its mainnet officially launched in June 2018.

According to the official Arweave site (arweave.org), the network describes itself as "a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets." The whitepaper is available at https://www.arweave.org/whitepaper/.

Why Use AR?

If you think that big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Alibaba are putting too much power in the hands of a few, you might be interested in Arweave.

Arweave is a decentralized storage network designed to offer permanent data preservation for a one-time, upfront fee, unlike centralized cloud storage.

AR is used to pay for permanent data storage on the network and to reward miners.

Arweave allows anyone with excess hard drive space to store data in exchange for AR tokens; AR is used to pay data upload fees and to reward miners for maintaining copies of data. Mining returns depend on network conditions and the market price of AR, which is volatile.

The storage endowment mechanism is designed to remove AR tokens from the liquid market as network adoption grows, which is intended to make the token deflationary over time.

Crypto asset prices are volatile and can fall sharply; this article is for information only and is not investment advice.