A Reporter’s View: Infrastructure in the Arweave Ecosystem in 2023
A Reporter’s View: Infrastructure in the Arweave Ecosystem in 2023
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Author: Adeola @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Reviewer: Henry @ Contributor of PermaDAO
This is the first of a series of articles that will review major activities of projects in the Arweave ecosystem in the year 2023. As a reporter who has covered the Arweave ecosystem for two years, i know some projects have done really well this year while some underperformed. This report contains the reporter’s opinion on which project did major things that are worthy of being mentioned.
The role infrastructure and tools play in the growth of a blockchain’s ecosystem can be likened to the foundation of a building. The strength of a blockchain’s technology and the diversity of its use case drive developers to build tools which could potentially result in multiple applications being built. This can be said of the Arweave blockchain.
Arweave began the year 2023 with 33 infrastructure and tools protocols from 25 projects in 2022. Throughout the year, there were multiple partnerships between projects within and outside the ecosystem; projects fixed bugs and announced new features. The composable nature of Arweave together with developers’ drive to build, contributed to the growth of infrastructure in the ecosystem.
4EVERLAND
In the first quarter of the year, 4EVERLAND which is a project that facilitates data storage and hosting service on Arweave and other storage networks, partnered with Livepeer, a video transcoding platform to be a caching layer for the latter’s video services on Arweave. It also formed a partnership with the likes of WeaveDB, showing that the duo meet publishing needs of blogs. Although 4EVERLAND uses other storage services alongside Arweave, it proved in October this year that Arweave is a major storage platform when it announced that it uploaded 60 million files.
Ar.io
If you asked anyone at Ar.io Network what their biggest achievement was in 2023, the answer would be opening up the technology behind access points to Arweave. In mid 2023, ar.io open sourced the code for creating an Arweave gateway. Ar.io said it was aiming to remove single point of failure and build a resilient network. In two months, the number of Arweave gateways rose to more than 200. Ar.io followed this with a means to find gateways by creating the gateway registry and demonstrating what GAR can be used for by building Wayfinder. Wayfinder, is a Chrome extension that routes users to optimal gateways.
Irys
Refer to Irys as the most successful project in the Arweave ecosystem by user and transaction logged and you won’t be wrong. In 2023, Irys (formerly Bundlr) moved from being the project that scaled Arweave to rebranding and launching provenance which it says makes data permanent, unconstrained and precise. Popular projects outside the Arweave ecosystem including Solana Mobile and Immutable, have partnered with Irys to benefit from its provenance offering. Still on scalability, in January, Irys decided to test its reputation for scaling Arweave by firing its system with 50,000 transactions per second. It processed it successfully. This demo must have contributed to convincing the team at Lens Protocol to use Irys and Arweave to build the data availability layer of Momoka. Irys ensures data is successfully uploaded to Arweave’s permanent and cost effective storage network.
Dojima
A look at Dojima Network’s activities this year suggests it made effort to get its product adopted and students at tertiary institutions in India are one of its biggest targets.
It also launched a chain explorer and ‘Function as a Service’ which it says provides users with blockchain functionality such as calculating gas rates and signing transactions.
Dojima Network is a decentralised cross-chain layer 1 platform that connects all the major blockchains by acting as a middle ground between layer1 and layer 2 blockchain applications to solve pressing needs in the ecosystem.
FirstBatch
At the start of 2023, FirstBatch, a project building collaboration and user-centric tools for artificial general intelligence released a statement on why it was building Arweave. It said Arweave was the solution to its EVM bottlenecks and disadvantages. Throughout the year, FirstBatch was busy building tools. In the first quarter, it released HollowDB which it built on Arweave to allow the storage of complex objects as key-value pairs on the blockchain, gated by zero-knowledge proofs. It built and released Gravitate which combines both GPT-4 summarization and hyper-personalization identity to revolutionze your reading experience on social media and content platforms, also in the first quarter. In the second quarter, FirstBatch used Arweave and Warp Contracts to build DANNY, a decentralised vector database for building transparent AI application. DANNY can be seen in action when used with Gravitate, FirstBatch founder, Ömer Kaya said. It also released FirstBatch ID to help users get personalized experience on content platforms. It ended the year with User Embeddings, which maps users’ mind into personal AI memories. By empowering developers to build personalized LLM apps and grow sustaining generative AI user engagement, FirstBatch is a project to watch in the AI and Web3 space in 2024.
Kwil
A lot of Kwil’s activities this year focused on building to strengthen the structure of its relational database technology.
In one month, it launched version two Alpha, an SDK which it says will help users to build decentralised relational database and the Kwil CLI, a tool for interacting with the database. Even Darwin, the Chief Technology Officer of Decentland Labs wrote that Kwil has “great docs, tooling and smooth experience”. Some of the major activities of Kwil for this year are launching Kuneiform which is a tool that enables deploying decentralised application’s backend in 100 lines of codes; a refined SDK which the project said was informed by feedback from users.
Kwil also expanded its SQL SYNTAX to allow support for SQL and help developers build complex applications. What is a database without an explorer? Kwil made its database infrastructure more robust by introducing an explorer in June.
It was followed by Extensions which developers can use to connect to blockchains and execute logic. Kwil is closing the year by decentralising its network by making it possible for anyone to build and deploy a decentralised relational database.
KYVE
The year 2023 must be a fruitful one for KYVE Network: it was nominated for Startup of the year award, and launched their mainnet. Launching mainnet is as feat that took two years of preparation with little but steady effort that continued into 2023.
This year, it started the KYVE Foundation which is meant to support the development, adoption and growth of the project and its ecosystem. In March, the mainnet kicked off and in July, it had logged 1M transactions and an all-time 10,000,000 transactions. The community was so positive about the project that 100 chain validator slots got filled in a few hours according to KYVE. The mainnet software went through four updates in 2023.
KYVE Academy was also created to help users expand their knowledge of Web3. The academy had more than 3,300 users in two months. Cosmos Hub, Osmosis Zone, Archway, Axelar were the official data pools added this year while it also restructured its operations following a governance approval to open pool funding to more people which is a step towards completely decentralising the network.
If KYVE is a project you like and wondered what influences what the team built, here is what Fabian Riewe, the founder of KYVE told me in November when it logged 10M transactions: Knowing the partner chain’s pain points helped KYVE to build effective solutions.
Livepeer
Livepeer is one of the pioneers of using Arweave infrastructure for video services. It stores on the Arweave storage protocol using Irys (formerly Bundlr). The project began the year by releasing an API and SDK which increased added support for more file formats and larger file size. It enhanced its video infrastructure software to allow developers to build short form videos for social platforms (imagine a TikTok for Web3) and also allow token gating for video upload. In August alone, it powered over 11 million minutes of unique video streaming. In October, it upgraded its software following a governance approval to allow for some changes to the treasury aspect of its protocol. At the end of the year, Livepeer launched Studio CLI which it says that it helps developers get a Livepeer Studio API key and launch an ultra low latency video app in seconds. Livepeer Delta Protocol revolves around the idea of public goods treasury which is seen as an opportunity to further decentralise Livepeer ecosystem’s growth. There are indications that users of Livepeer may see the project build products that are related to artificial intelligence.
Streamr
Streamr, a peer-to-peer network for publishing and subscribing to data in real-time project, announced and solidified its presence in the Arweave ecosystem by partnering with Usher Labs, KYVE and the Arweave Protocol to launch LogStore Network. LogStore leverages the simplicity of data transport over the Streamr Network, consensus-driven data validity managed by KYVE and guaranteed permanence and immutability of data with Arweave. Expect to see more integration of LogStore Network among projects in the Arweave ecosystem in 2024.
Meson Network
In a roadmap released early in the year, Meson Network planned to focus on building GaganNode. GagaNode is a next generation Decentralized Residential IP + Bandwidth marketplace, that aims to alleviate the global shortage of IPv4 addresses with Web3.0 technology. In terms of innovation, decentralised bandwidth market Meson Network kicked off 2023 with GatewayX. GatewayX is used to solve origin unavailability for storage and media websites. It launched GagaNode Pro version in May and followed it with Ipcola, as a solution to connectivity barriers. Meson introduced the Vector Plan this year. Meson plans to transition to a Nasdaq-like marketplace for bandwidth and the year 2024 may be when it will roll out this plan.
Molecular Execution Machine
Molecular Execution Machine (MEM) is Decent Land Labs' move into the tooling space in the Arweave ecosystem after it was rebranded. It said its mission is to break down barriers between chains and protocols. Launched in the middle of 2023, MEM serves as a pillar of support of other protocols Decentland has built such as NameSpace, Ark Protocol, Arweave Name Service. Outside Decentland, its tech also supports everPay and Kwil. The possibility for developers to use MEM to write smart contracts in different languages positions it as an important tool to build. As part of its plan to decentralise, MEM said it is moving some core pieces of its infrastructure to Akash.
RedStone
Throughout the year, many projects in the Web3 ecosystem partnered with RedStone for its tailor-made Oracle solutions: RedStone Core, RedStone Classic, RedStoneX. There were no software upgrades, RedStone’s activities this year suggest a project that already has a working and matured technology and now focusing on promotions for its oracle data feeds. But for RedStone’s sister company, Warp Contracts, which is the most popular method for implementing smart contracts in the Arweave Ecosystem used by dozens of the most prominent projects, it is different. The project began the year by releasing Warp Contracts CLI, Warp Templates and Warp D.R.E. They all provide different functionalities for developers. SonAR, Warp Key Value Storage, Warp Nested Bundle were shipped in February. It launched a Contract Constructor in March. Its software was taken a notch up when it released an SDK upgrade. Warp Contracts had an average of one feature or infrastructure launch per month in 2023. The impact of projects like Warp Contracts on the ecosystem is huge. While in February, it announced that it had deployed one million smart weave contracts, between February and May, the figure had grown to five million contracts deployed.
Spheron
For Spheron, its co-founder Prashant Maurya began the year with the claim that the project was the first to bring Arweave outside of the ecosystem. In April, Spheron, the project which offers deployment and scaling for applications launched NftyNFT to make storing NFTs easier. This was followed by the launch of Compute SDK.
The Graph Protocol
The Graph Protocol and the Graph Network got 37 billion queries in March of 2023 alone compared to ChapGPT that gets 300million queries per month, according to Tegan Kline, one of the launchers of The Graph Protocol. The Graph Protocol has released a three-phased plan, which are Sunray, Sunbeam and Sunrise. It said it would aid advancement towards decentralised data and enable the smooth upgrade to The Graph Network for all supported chains including Arweave and 42 others.
WeaveDB
Armed with a $900k funding and a new CEO, WeaveDB, a decentralised NoSQL database took on many activities for 2023. It engaged mainly in promotional activities. It launched ‘managed nodes services, only for Developer DAO members which helps to remove the need to own a node interact with WeaveDB. The project also optimized its system to allow a write query speed of 30 to 50ms. It also introduced Jots, a decentralised social network. At the year’s end, WeaveDB announced that it revamped it structure to go modular which it said allows it to support different types of database such as relational database from the same data source on Arweave.
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