Thursday, April 25, 2024
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2023-02-10
By Pierre
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #72: The ‘Release the 2.6 Kraken’ Edition

This week culminated with two main events, one regarding the Arweave network and one concerning the broader blockchain space: Arweave 2.6 was finally released, and we suspect that it will break a lot of established charts. For the broader crypto world, the event we’re referring to is not at all as positive as the one that concerned the arweavers: Kraken, one of the leading centralised US-based crypto exchanges, was forced by the SEC to dump its staking program. Combine those two and you’ll get the sweet-sour pun present in the title of this weekly report. But hey, what can one do when this contrast between what happens in the Arweave garden and what’s going on around the broader Web3 feud is almost every week as stark as now?

If serenity is what you’re looking for, come join us, you can start by reading this weekly report, after all, even if Arweave is a garden, it is not walled off – everybody is welcomed.

I. Arweave Network

Normally, we’d have started with this piece of news, expanding it and creating a little bit of context for new users. You can see that on the seventh of February, there was a spike in daily transactions – over 4.5 million. Historically this places it as the third all-time high day since the inception of Arweave Netorwk, which is pretty cool on its own.

But then the news below arrived, and suddenly the news about the peak in daily transactions became as relevant as my IQ at a MENSA convention:

The die is cast, the Kraken will be released (I know, I can’t help it), yada-yada. In the first week of march Arweave 2.6 fork will be activated, and a new era that will mark probably the most power-efficient take on Proof of Work consensus mechanisms will begin on Arweave. As you may know, or at least expect, we wrote quite a lot about this new iteration of the protocol. You can check it here and here. Nevertheless, probably the most concise summary of it you’ll find in the words of the founder of the protocol in this thread:

II. Arweave Ecosystem

Arweave 101 is now in preview!

This week, our very own DMac announced that Arweave 101, the video series he has been working on, is almost ready for the public to see! In preparation for the big reveal, he hosted a small get-together in Gather, where we got to see a sneak preview of the series. We got a chance to participate and we have to say, the videos look amazing! The Arweave 101 series is designed to help your non-technical friends understand what Arweave is, how it works and why it’s the future of data storage. Based on what we’ve seen, we’re certain that they’ll be the entry point for many new users in the Arweave universe. Make sure to follow DMac and stay tuned for the release of the video series!

P.S. We’ve heard Arweave 102 might be just around the corner!

Step aside, ENS. ANS is ready to take center stage!

This week, decent.land brought joy to our hearts when we received the long-awaited news that the Arweave Name Service (ANS) is ready to launch! This service is the first of its kind for Arweave (even if some may find some naming overlaps) and ushers in a new era of decentralised naming on the permaweb. It allows users to register a name and link it to an Arweave wallet address, making sending and receiving funds easier and more secure than ever. The ANS will also provide a platform for decentralised applications to use names in their services, allowing users to have their own permanent identity across the entire permaweb. Right now, ANS is already supported by ViewBlock and the Arweave social explorer ar.page. Additionally, the team also told us they are already working on integrating ANS with ArConnect, making transfers to your friends a walk in the park!

Now, for the exciting part – the team has also shared dates with us! The plan is for the whitelist mint of ANS to start on the 17th of Feb, giving whitelisted users a one week headstart and a 10% discount. Next, on the 24th of February, the public mint will go live, allowing everyone to get their own unique ANS name! Head on over to their blog post to see if you meet the criteria for the whitelist and if you don’t, there’s no need to worry. It seems the team is still running some contests to get users whitelisted, so you might want to follow them closely to make sure you can get your desired name before someone else snatches it!

Of course, the team couldn’t have settled with just ONE big piece of news… The overachievers in them also decided to release a whole new feature for their sender.gg protocol! sender.gg forms are now live, enabling users and developers to collect on-chain form submissions with any combination of criteria and wallets! This means that collecting data and checking if a user is eligible for a whitelist is now a walk in the park. Good news is that all data collected from users will be stored on-chain and can be easily called upon by other EXM smart contracts. The team is already using this new feature as part of their ANS mint and promised to open-source it soon for the world to enjoy.

STAMPs just got an upgrade!

Your favourite STAMP protocol announced the release of v0.2 this week! In this new update, the team has built the ability to SUPER STAMP content on Arweave, enabling you to go above and beyond in supporting your favourite creators. Through SUPER STAMPs you can tip your creators $STAMP tokens that they will directly receive, showing them just how much you appreciate their content! Additionally, with the release of v0.2, the team also published a new library that makes integrating the STAMP protocol in any dApp a breeze! Check out their full announcement to find out all the details and go SUPER STAMP your favourite pieces of content.

P.S. Don’t forget to vouch for yourself using VouchDAO to be able to STAMP away!

Kaon has arrived!

This week, KYVE had big news for us with the launch of their Kaon Testnet! The team has told us that Kaon will serve as a final testing environment before their Mainnet launch. This latest Testnet is intended to provide users with an opportunity to get a closer look at what the KYVE Mainnet will offer and also help the team iron out all the details of the network. For now, Kaon is only open to users who have an entitlement for $KYVE tokens, so if you’re one of the lucky ones, make sure to start exploring! As for the rest of us, the team has promised to make the network available soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the launch, check out our coverage at the following link.

Alex. is uncovering if we are alone

This past week marked the end of the Alex. Poolathon and the crowning of the winner! If you’re not familiar with the concept of a Poolathon, that’s why we’re here. Alex. is a decentralised archival platform that uses “pools” to archive news, documents, and other types of media on a specific topic or world event forever. For instance, the platform has been used to cover the US mid-term elections and the crypto “crunch” of 2022. Any user can create an archival pool surrounding an important topic or event, and all members of the community are invited to contribute to the pool, being in turn rewarded through artifacts – unique NFTs.

The Poolathon was a community competition to create new and relevant archival pools on the platform. And now, the winner of this first Poolathon has been selected by the team! The winning archival pool is “Are We Alone” – a fascinating look at the question that has been on humanity’s mind for centuries. Are we really alone on this wonderful planet that we call home? Check out what the community collected in the over 250 thousand artifacts that were submitted!

Did anyone say GDPR on the permaweb?

One of the concerns that arise in people’s and businesses’ minds when considering the adoption of the permaweb are GDPR requirements for individuals in Europe. For our readers that are not based in the European Union, GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation that enables individuals to have control over their personal data and how it is processed by third parties. And as per multiple European governmental bodies, blockchains also fall under the incidence of GDPR when personal data is stored on it. Therefore, it’s crucial for the large-scale adoption of the permaweb that projects build their dApps with GDPR in mind.

We’re guessing that’s why Akord enlisted Celine Autreux, a lawyer and Data Protection Officer, to analyse how GDPR applies to the permaweb and, more specifically, the Akord protocol. Their findings are quite interesting and we encourage all readers to review the blog post. In short, Akord manages to satisfy the vast majority of GDPR requirements through their use of private vaults, which only the user can access. Additionally, the team stated that they will work on developing new technologies such as the Akord Explorer to be able to fully satisfy all requirements, allowing individuals and businesses alike to store their data safely on the permaweb. Congratulations to the team for taking this important first step on the path to wide-scale adoption of Arweave!

A new week, a new partnership for everVision

As we’ve come to know, Arweave is an ecosystem defined by the community. That’s why it’s not at all surprising to see projects within the ecosystem collaborating and leveraging each others technologies to provide users with a superior product. And this week, it’s the turn of everVision and ECHO to forge a new strategic partnership! As part of this new collaboration between the teams, ECHO will leverage everVision’s technology stack to develop a real-time, gasless tipping feature. They plan on integrating the everPay payment protocol and everVision’s Web3Infra development suite to enable instant payments and storage of data on Arweave. Check out all the details of their new partnership in their blog post!

III. Things you won’t encounter on Arweave

I’ll use this tweet as a starting point for a slightly different approach to “never on Arweave”. Obviously, this was written in the aftermath of the Kraken-SEC showdown. I will not comment on the second part, the relation of regulatory bodies with the broader crypto ecosystem is something that will continually generate friction and is somehow normal. However, I want to emphasise the first part of the tweet, the simple “let’s stop being greedy fucks”.

This triggered me a memory of a discussion where somebody claimed that Arweave is flawed because it does not produce great profit for the miners. Arguably, most of the crypto folks are here to maximise the profit they can get from one network or another. Innately, this is not a bad thing, but not all the potential use cases blockchain could open are correlated with maximising profit for a particular class of actors involved in a network.

Arweave, from what I know, was built to be fair with all the participants – it is making great efforts to provide fair compensation for the miners’ work (and Arweave 2.6 is here to prove exactly this), but at the same time, is trying to provide a fair price of storage for the users who upload data. As crazy as it may sound, Arweave is not here to make miners rich, it is to create an affordable and resilient system for storing large data sets in a highly redundant manner for as long as possible. Maybe I’m wrong, time will tell, but in my opinion, incentives other than wealth can motivate people to participate in such a network. I can see a time when national archives will participate as miners on Arweave, not particularly for the rewards, but for the sake of immutability and resilience, Arweave is giving to their own dataset. The rewards will be used by them only to offset the cost of uploading their data.

Anyway, enough with my rant. Greed is a thing that you will hardly find on Arweave.

IV. Arweave explained by Baudelaire – thanks to ChatGPT

This week we asked Chat GPT to explain Arweave as Baudelaire would have done it. For those who don’t know, Baudelaire was the first emo guy recorded in history, so we expected a rather grim representation, you know, Les Fleurs Du Mal style…guess what, didn’t happen. Instead, ChatGPT threw a rather fancy poem in French.

Arweave, un océan de données

Immuable, une mémoire éternelle

Pour tout ce qui est important pour nous

Un gardien de nos pensées les plus précieuses

 

Un parchemin numérique pour l’humanité

Où les idées ne meurent jamais

Où la connaissance est éternelle A

rweave est notre futur, notre trésor éternel.

Yeah, it looks good, but we didn’t understand a thing, so we transformed the poem into what god intended it to be: an English translation after a French poem written by a machine to mimic the style of a 19th-century guy with an inclination for the dark side.

Arweave, a sea of data

Immutable, an eternal memory

For all that is dear to us

A keeper of our most precious thoughts

 

A digital parchment for humanity

Where ideas never die

Where knowledge is eternal

Arweave is our future, our eternal treasure.

V. ICYMI

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Pierre

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

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