Happy birthday, Arweave!
Today marks the 8th anniversary of the launch of Arweave mainnet.
Over the last year, the centralized training wheels of the permaweb have come off. Gateways, bundlers, and the query layer are all now open to be run by anyone, and incentives are coming into place.
Today there are...
1️⃣ Trustless, verifiable gateways: The main gateways to Arweave now all serve their data in trustless, verifiable form. Every response comes with all of the information needed to verify that the content that they asked for is the data that they received.
2️⃣ Incentives for gateway operators: Anyone can join a gateway and permissionlessly start to earn for serving content to users. This gateway has started to take over serving a small portion of Arweave . net’s end-user traffic, scaling up over time.
3️⃣ Decentralized bundlers: You can now upload data through a decentralized network of bundlers which anyone can join and start to serve permaweb user requests through. Node operators can earn by running nodes in this network permissionlessly, and users can trust the LapEE(/TEE) implementations, not the node operators themselves.
4️⃣ Decentralized indexers: Those community run LapEE/TEE nodes can even now be used to index and query data on Arweave, inheriting the same trust-minimization properties as bundlers. No public router for this just yet, but try it on your own node — it works 🙂.
A year ago none of these were possible. Each was a hard fought battle and there is still a long way to go to make them the defaults in the ecosystem, but the bedrock is now in-place.
Where next?
8 years is a long time, and while the mission of Arweave remains immutable the structure of the web itself is shifting: From discrete apps each with a separate team, to a world of agent-built services customized for each user. The next web will not look like the last.
I am truly excited about this because Arweave’s permaweb is the perfect substrate for a web that is no longer defined by static, siloed UIs, but instead morphs and mutates at the speed of user’s wishes. For many years we have focused on creating a web that enables composability through…
➡️ Open content: Owned by users, accessible in every app – rather than any single company/service.
➡️ Open infrastructure: Shared between every app, permissionlessly utilized to back every app, not any single particular application.
…and now this stack is finally able to be decentralized, too.
This architecture just so happens to offer exactly the mix of attributes needed to create an open version of the agent-driven web. When a useful/fun app is just an afternoon’s work, rather than a year’s, creators (no longer just limited to devs) do not want to run specific infrastructure or hire a team just for that single service. Instead, an existing open catalogue of content, matched with open infrastructure they can simply start to send calls to, is the perfect place to build.
Can’t wait to see this in practice. More soon.
Onwards! 🙂
Sites and apps built on #Arweave will be the recognized gold standard for reliability.
Decades of uptime. No monthly hosting bill. No server going dark.
Who wouldn't want that for their app?
The Permaweb has arrived.
Arweave Name System recently announced they are sunsetting, so we are introducing Permaweb Names: a unified, truly decentralized name system. Native on AO, built for the whole Permaweb.
New tokens will be issued to each Arweave name holder on June 1st and automatically setup such that existing names will remain resolvable, ensuring continuity.
Two quick details 👇
1. Permaweb Name sales will be made in AO tokens, with *all* fees going to a protocol balance that will slowly be released to subsidize free, verifiable gateway access for everyone -- with no hidden points of centralization. This was the original vision we pitched for the Arweave Name Service and we are excited to see it run now that verifiable gateways are live.
2. In addition to supporting Arweave Name System name holders affected by the sunset of the service, it is time that the many naming experiments from the permaweb's early years are unified under one autonomous protocol. Where name claims overlap the following precedence will be used: ANS (an 'Arweave Name Service' from @DecentLandLabs 🫡), Arweave Account ('ArProfile v3'), ArProfile v2, ArProfile v1.
Stay tuned for more announcements as the switch-over arrives, but for now: All permaweb names are safu.
The Government of Bermuda is deploying AI-powered public services on NEAR AI's confidential inference infrastructure.
The partnership launches with a NEAR-powered AI assistant that keeps public servants’ personal data confidential 🧵
So why does AO matter… in real life?
Let’s make it simple.
You go online to complete a government form. You fill everything out. Click submit. Done.
A week later… you get a notice:
“You failed to submit. $1,000 fine.”
What?! 😳
After almost 8 years of uptime, @ArweaveEco's protocol works exactly as it was designed to. There's a beauty to the reliability of permanence.
In a world of constant change, the Arweave philosophy ages well.
@ar_io_network
Since Arweave remains your storage layer, why was ao not considered for the smart contract logic and what specific limitations (latency, tooling, liquidity, or ecosystem) made Solana the better fit for your AI audit & verification use case?
@ar_io_network@solana Since Arweave remains your storage layer, why was ao not considered for the smart contract logic and what specific limitations (latency, tooling, liquidity, or ecosystem) made Solana the better fit for your AI audit & verification use case?
It’s the compute layer that makes a truly decentralized internet possible.
Without it, you’re storing data permanently but still relying on centralized services to do anything with it.
AO closes that gap.
The market hasn’t priced in the infrastructure importance yet.”
Arweave solved permanence.
https://t.co/BwTgRmNivW solved decentralized access.
But the internet still needed computation the ability to run decentralized apps and autonomous agents on top of permanent storage.
That’s AO.
Sixty years of guaranteed immutable storage for documents, code, and AI training data? That’s infrastructure.
The question isn’t whether Arweave hits two hundred years perfectly.
It’s whether it hits anywhere close, because even partial delivery beats everything else.
I’m invested in Arweave, so disclaimer upfront.
As AI systems proliferate, they’ll need immutable permanent records training data provenance, decision logs, audit trails nobody can alter. That’s where Arweave matters.
The math behind their two hundred year permanence claim is sound.
But even if storage costs don’t decline and they only deliver sixty years instead, that’s still vastly better than any alternative. Filecoin requires renewal.
AWS could shut down. Traditional backups fail.
.@aoTheComputer is creating more opportunities for accessing data on Arweave.
We think this is a good thing.
Migrating the arweave(.)net gateway to HyperBEAM makes it easier to run a gateway on lower-end hardware.
More accessibilty is a plus!