Thursday, April 25, 2024
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2023-01-19
By Pierre
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #68: The ‘Delayed’ Edition

Behold the delayed weekly report. The winter holidays have passed, then the middle of January, and still no signs of the customary weekly report. Worry not because we are back. Actually, we never stopped watching what’s happening inside the ecosystem, on the contrary, after the analysis, we decided to step up our game, as you’ll see if you’ll read this odd report to the end. Why? Because Arweave’s ecosystem starts to become stronger and more complex by the day; this is visible in the lengths made by the ecosystem for standardisation. Permaswap is calling for a standard on how to deal with PST’s TXs, Warp Contracts is pushing for an Atomic NFT standard – the signs of maturity are undeniable. 

To find out about these and more, dive into our current weekly report!

I. Arweave Network

In the last week, there has been a visible and stable increase in the number of daily transactions. As you can see, for a consistent five days now, the number was over 2 million. What these figures mean is still to be revealed. Will they be dwarfed by daily TXs counts from the end of 2023?  To be honest, we don’t know how the network will evolve in the current year. There are certain signs that hint at the fact that this year’s growth will be exponentially sizeable than the already exponential yearly growth. We won’t make any predictions but keep in mind that in January 2021, the weave size was around 4.15 TB, and now, in January 2023, it is over 115 TB, while much of the infrastructure and developer’s tooling that was being built in the past year is still to be deployed in this one.

II. Arweave Ecosystem

Your direct line to the Permaweb has arrived

We’re excited to share that ForeverStories has released a new feature, giving all of us a direct connection to the permaweb! You can now record your story directly in-browser with just a click of a button, and it will be saved directly on the permaweb – no wallet or tokens necessary. By leveraging Akord, the team has managed to create one of the most frictionless dApps, allowing users to engage with the permaweb with zero hassle. What are you waiting for? Check out their website and start recording your ForeverStory today! Also, if you want to know more, you can check our interview with Ty Kroh, their founder.

Docs, docs, and some more docs!

Any developer knows that one of the crucial tasks when developing any piece of software is creating the proper documentation for it. It might not be anyone’s favorite activity, but good documentation is a sure-fire way to ensure people can adopt your product. The team over at Bundlr has taken this to heart, and for their first announcement of 2023, they delighted us with the release of their new docs. To celebrate this, they also promised to share new tutorials to help everyone get started with their protocol and even teased us with a surprise competition! Take a look at the refreshed documentation, and stay tuned for the upcoming contest!

Akord is starting the year with new looks and new code!

To celebrate the beginning of the year, the Akord team has announced their full-on rebranding, which we have to say, looks amazing! As part of this exercise, they worked with a set of branding gurus, GoodLove, to re-engineer not only their website but their overall brand. The team has given this initiative a lot of thought and was kind enough to walk us through both the rebranding process and their future ambitions in their latest blog post.

We’re guessing the team wanted to show us that the work of a builder never stops, as shortly after the rebrand, they also released an over-the-weekend update to Akord v2! The new release brought a big upgrade to the search functionalities, helping users access their files faster, as well as performance improvements due to an under-the-hood refactoring (cutting more than 7k lines of code!). Be sure to check out their improved search and new looks to find out more about why creating a unique brand really does matter!

WeaveDB is bringing fresh data to Arweave

It seems the team at Weave DB wanted to have a strong finish to 2022, so in the last days of the year, they delighted us with not one but two major announcements.

First, they announced the release of an off-chain Relayer for WeaveDB. You might be wondering what a Relayer is or why it’s important news, so let us explain shortly. Relayers are the infrastructure used for sending assets or information across chains, and in WeaveDB’s case, the Relayer they developed can be used to bridge any data from other chains to WeaveDB, storing it directly on Arweave. We’re guessing that by now, you can imagine the impact this development can have on the entire ecosystem, so make sure to check out the detailed announcement by the team.

If the Relayer announcement wasn’t enough to keep us busy, they followed it up the next day with the announcement of their redesign, introducing a whole new look for WeaveDB. As per the team, the new look reflects their commitment to providing us with the best possible user experience. In our opinion, the new design looks great, but we’re eager to hear what you think as well, so head on over to their new website to see for yourself!

Do you have your Ark ID ready?

As we’ve already gotten accustomed to, no week passes by without a new announcement from decent.land. And why would the first week of January be an exception? This time around, they launched a new feature for their Ark Protocol, named Ark ID. It enables Ark users to see and manage all the addresses they have connected to the protocol, helping them seamlessly manage their identity across chains.

And that’s not all, this past week, the team announced the three winners of the Ark Protocol hackathon! The winners are: 1notif, the multi-chain gasless notification protocol, Art By City, a Web3 art curation protocol, and last but not least, Arcademy, the Arweave community-driven learning platform. All of them developed great projects using Ark Protocol, so make sure to head on to the hackathon’s page and discover what the teams built.

Now, we couldn’t cover the Ark Protocol hackathon and leave the following news out. It seems that the outstanding work of 1notif earned them not only the first prize, but also an acquisition deal! It looks like they will be joining the decent.land family to assist them in building out the social infrastructure of Web3 and, of course, the associated notifications protocol. Congratulations to both teams for the deal, and see what Bob Chahine, the founder of 1notif, had to say about the acquisition and the experience of building with Ark Protocol during the hackathon!

Warp goes Atomic!

Another year, another Warp release to look forward to! This time around, they’ve upgraded the Warp Infrastructure to support the deployment of Atomic NFTs. More specifically, any NFT deployed through Warp has the contract and data available in the Arweave Gateway under the same transaction ID and is instantly available. There’s no excuse now to use the ERC-721 NFT standard, which risks having your users end up owning an empty NFT token, so check out Warp and start deploying your new shiny atomic NFTs.

Permaswap seeks consensus for PSTs

As many of you might know, the team at everVision recently launched the main-net BETA of Permaswap, the first cross-chain DEX for Arweave. As part of the BETA, they wanted to bring PSTs to their DEX, but they are facing some challenges. Currently, PSTs can be processed either directly through native Arweave transactions or as a transaction via a gateway bundle, such as Warp. This means that the data Permaswap needs to have a complete ledger of PST transactions scattered across different locations, which poses a security risk, potentially exposing the DEX to a double-spending attack.

That’s why they are asking for the community’s consensus on establishing a PST standard and how transactions will be handled. The team has made some interesting proposals in their blog post, so be sure to check them out and help with the future of PSTs!

III. Things you will encounter on Arweave this year

This section is usually called “Things you won’t encounter on Arweave”. Given the fact that this edition is already a pretty oddball, we’re taking the liberty to derail it.  As we stated above, we refrain from making predictions – we’re not making the news, we’re just presenting them. Still, on rare occasions like this one, we’re capable of concocting our own news, so here is what to expect from Arweave.News as an organization in the incoming year:

  • A new website, deeply rooted in Arweave, not only from a content perspective but from a technical as well.
  • Recurrent live podcasts with Arweavers and Arweave friends alike – in case you missed it, we already inaugurated series called Arweave’s Voice (representing a partnership between PermaDAO and us), having the one and only sam Williams as the special guest.
  • Recurrent contests for content creators that should muster a new generation of independent writers from the midst of Arweavers.
  • Finally, expanding the content creation to its entire spectrum by encompassing more channels and mediums of expression – the spearhead of this approach being an improved version of Permacast. (think of it as the immortal baby resulting from a romance story between Spotify and Youtube)
  • The growth of the Arweave.News team, in order to accommodate this vision.

Take into consideration that this is just a glimpse of what we’re trying to bring to Arweave during this new year. The work poured into the ecosystem by the forever-expanding number of projects involved in building the Permaweb, honestly humbles us. By pushing for all these upgrades, we hope that we’ll manage to catch and disseminate the news faster and better and then immortalise them forever. We’re aiming to create the media outlet Arweave deserves.

IV. ICYMI

 

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Pierre

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

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