Wednesday, April 24, 2024
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2022-12-10
By Pierre
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #66: The ‘Nested Bundles’ Edition

So, what happened this week on Arweave? Well, if it weren’t for the Arweave ecosystem, we could have just said “nested bundles” and closed the section. For most of the existing ecosystems out there, this kind of news is more than enough to be rolled for weeks alone; on Arweave, it is just the tip of the weekly iceberg. Oh, and another highlight of the week is RedStone’s KYD 😉

If you want to know more about the Inception-like “bundles in bundles” and other fresh news from the Arweave space, just dive into our weekly report number 66, yeap, like the route.

I. Arweave Network

For quite some time, we explored other areas of the Arweave network, and in the process, we “neglected” to bring forward one core metric: the number of transactions conducted on the network. It should be no shock for those that followed Arweave’s evolution in the past months that after hitting a low in July, the number of transactions continued to rise month over month.

Looking at the chart above, it’s obvious that November 2022 was the third-best month to date transaction-wise. If we take into consideration what happened in November in the broader crypto space, we can consider that despite the gruesome conjunctures that shattered the Web3 ecosystem, it didn’t stall the overall momentum of the network. Maybe this has to do with the fact that Arweave ecosystem’s exposure to FTX was rather insignificant, or it’s just proof that protocols with intrinsic value tend to have their own life, despite external conditions.

II. Arweave Ecosystem

Have you heard about the poolathon yet?

Alex., the decentralised archival platform you all already know and love, announced that they are launching their own version of a hackathon, the “poolathon”. The way Alex. works is that anyone can create an archival pool surrounding an important event or topic. Once a pool is created, members of the community can contribute with data, and in return, they are rewarded through artifacts – unique NFTs related to the archival pool.

The “poolathon” is designed to incentivise users to create new and relevant archival pools by offering rewards of 4000 USD for the most successful ones. Check out the rules of the “poolathon” at Alex. Poolathon — 0x4271…569A8f (mirror.xyz) and start creating your own archival pool.

Are you experiencing a sudden desire to hit Like?

It might be due to ECHO’s new Like button, which they released this week. As they say “Like is like and Like likes like”, so the team developed the feature to help you like anything on the permaweb and help support other projects. All projects need to do is embed the ECHO Button on their project page and start collecting Liking Power. Check out how the new feature works by heading over to ECHO | Long live our opinion (0xecho.com) or check out Planet Hunter to see the first live implementation of the button.

molecule.sh brings AI on-chain

If you thought the team over at decent.land would take a break after last week’s lengthy announcements list, you weren’t the only one. However, it seems they want to prove us all wrong and have released two new updates to molecule.sh, the developer tooling they have built for EXM. The first update enables developers to easily check whether an ARK user owns a specific .eth or other domain types without any additional development, making domain ownership easily verifiable across chains.

As for the second update, the team has gone even further and has embedded the ability to call OpenAI models within EXM smart contracts! Yes, you heard that right, smart contracts can now use AI models to understand natural language and even generate NFTs based on a provided prompt. If this isn’t revolutionary for the world of smart contracts, we don’t know what is. If you haven’t done so already, check out molecule.sh to see how you can leverage AI inside your dApp and see all the work being done by the decent.land team for advancing development on EXM and the Permaweb!

Redstone is paving the way for the institutional adoption of DeFi

Redstone launched the KYD Oracle this week, a new and revolutionary type of Oracle that aims to assist with vetting the legitimacy of an end-user. As per the team, KYD stands for Know Your Data and the goal of this new Oracle is to allow projects to understand the reputation of their customers, with minimal intrusion for the end-user and with no access to the end-user’s personal data. As the team explains it:

Everything you do on-chain is an immutable piece of your reputation. KYD Oracle leverages that along with the KYC/AML processes you have already gone through to give you a ‘score’ within the DeFi space.

This is an automatic way of checking your legal eligibility when you interact with the DeFi smart contract. No additional steps on your end are needed, no popups, no logging into an external service. It all happens through the code and is powered by on-chain data.

This new development solves the main roadblock institutional actors were facing towards the large scale adoption of DeFi by enabling them to understand the risk profile of their end-users and perform the necessary AML & KYC processes in a decentralised and anonymous manner. Learn more about how the new Oracle works and how it can be customized for the needs of any institution from the official announcement.

In other news, the Redstone infrastructure was leveraged to solve one of TRON network’s biggest challenges – the lack of diversified and custom data feeds. As part of the third season of the TRON Grand Hackathon, the Redstone team created the TRON Unlimited Oracle which delivers price feeds for over 1.000 assets from over 46 sources, all updated every 10 seconds. If that wasn’t impressive enough, any Web3 developer can now create a custom Oracle on the Tron network easily with just a few steps in Redstone’s web portal. If you’re an aspiring developer or are already building on the Tron network, make sure to test the new Oracle and bask in the warmth of data.

Building with Warp is now a breeze

Warp Contracts just announced the release of Warp Templates, a new feature for their Contracts CLI, enabling smart contract developers to generate new projects in seconds. Through the Warp Contracts CLI developers can now leverage both contract and UI templates, providing them a solid back-bone for their dApp and saving them precious time. To see how easy it is to generate a contract with Warp Templates and to see what the team has in store for the future, check out the Twitter thread below.

Besides the new release, the team also announced that the Warp Gateway endpoint for archived SDK versions would be retired in the next month, with any SDK version prior to 1.2.0 being deprecated. The team has taken this decision as older versions of the SDK provided limited functionality in interacting with contracts. Therefore, if you’re using an older version of the SDK make sure to update your project as soon as possible and if you encounter any difficulties during the upgrade process, the team is available on their Discord channel to assist.

Have you heard about Nested Bundles?!

The ar.io team announced a new update to the ANS-104 specification to allow for Nested Bundles, developed in collaboration with the Arweave Core Team, Bundlr, Redstone and ViewBlock. Are you asking yourself what Nested Bundles are and why they’re big news? Well, to give you some context, when the concept of simple bundles was introduced on Arweave it significantly increased the transaction throughput of the network and allowed the permaweb to grow ten-fold, from ~11TB in August 2021 to ~111TB today.

Now with nested bundles, any data item of a bundle can be a bundle itself and contain multiple items. Can you imagine what this means for the growth of Arweawe? Check out the Twitter thread below for a more detailed explanation of the new specification and what it will mean for the growth of Arweave.

Do you have a story for the ages?

Have you ever wondered what will happen to your story across the next 200 years? Will people remember you for who you were or will they have a murky picture tainted by the passing of time? We’re guessing this is also the question ForeverStories asked themselves when they decided on building their project. The team has worked on providing an easy way for anyone to tell their story and store it on the permaweb in just a few clicks. This week one of their users recorded his story, reflecting on their 30+ years of software design and what they learned regarding the development of applications. Make sure to listen to their story and record your own at foreverstories.xyz.

III. Things you won’t encounter on Arweave

At this point is anyone still surprised by the news below? We’ve seen countless cases of users checking their NFTs and being granted a blank screen or a 404 error. Even though the users still own the NFTs, facts which can be vetted on the blockchain, the image and metadata associated with the NFTs can be gone forever once the centralised Web2 platform which hosts these shuts down or goes bankrupt, as is the case of FTX.

Obsolescence is only one of the risks that classical NFTs face, as these are also vulnerable to malicious actors and censorship. Considering that the token owned by the user only contains a link to where the metadata is stored, a malicious actor can easily change the data stored at that particular address. Take the example of NFT artist neitherconfirm who replaced all the pictures associated with his project with a beautiful collection of rugs. This was a lucky case as the artist only wanted to highlight the fallibilities of NFTs, but it does make you wonder how fragile digital art really is.

Why could this never happen on Arweave? Decentralisation and immutability is what you’re looking for. In the case of NFTs stored on the Arweave, the design of the network safeguards your tokens by default. Any data stored on the permaweb is hosted by multiple nodes. Therefore, even if one party decides to shut down, your data is safely stored and available on the other nodes. The same goes for censorship or a malicious actor, even if they do manage to corrupt one of the nodes storing your NFT and alter it in some form, the rest of the nodes will reject the change and will safeguard your original.

IV. ICYMI

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Pierre

Passionate about Arweave, Archeology, and NFTs. Playing with words, dirt, and images.

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