What is Arweave (AR)?
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 5 min
In short
Arweave is a network built to store data for the long term in exchange for a single up-front payment. Most of that payment goes into an endowment that, combined with the historical fall in storage costs, is intended to fund ongoing storage. AR is the token used to pay for storage and to reward those who keep the data.
Key points
- Storage is paid for once at upload rather than as a recurring subscription
- Most of the payment funds an endowment that pays storage providers over time
- Mining requires proving possession of randomly chosen historical data
- The body of stored, browsable data is referred to as the permaweb
Definition
A decentralised storage network, and its native token, designed to store data long term for a single payment.
Content on the web disappears the moment someone stops paying for the server. Arweave addresses that by trying to make storage independent of recurring payments: users pay once at upload and are not billed again.
An endowment model underpins this. Beyond the portion needed to cover storage in the near term, most of each payment is held and released to storage nodes over time. The design assumes the long-run decline in storage prices continues; what happens if that assumption breaks remains an open question in the design.
Storage is proven by requiring miners, when producing a block, to present data from a randomly chosen past block. Because holding only recent data is not enough, nodes are given a reason to keep old data around.
In practice it is used to host NFT metadata and images, to archive blockchain history, and to publish articles and records in a form that is hard to take down. Gateways let browsers read stored data, and this whole space is called the permaweb.
Watch out for
- · Once written, data cannot be deleted or edited; uploading a file containing personal data cannot be undone
- · Permanence rests on the endowment and on assumptions about storage prices, not on a physical guarantee
- · Most access goes through gateways, so an outage at one affects how content appears
Frequently asked questions
How is it different from Filecoin?
The payment model differs. Filecoin uses time-bound storage deals between providers and clients; Arweave charges once and aims at long-term persistence. They suit different purposes rather than ranking against each other.