Friday, April 26, 2024
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2023-03-12
By Pierre
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Arweave Ecosystem Weekly Report #76: The ‘We Have Liftoff!’ Edition

The week that is just ending was for the crypto world, to put it mildly – chaotic. It started with rumours of Silvergate’s (a crypto bank) demise, which concluded with its bankruptcy, continued with a lawsuit for KuCoin (a major centralised crypto exchange), with Huobi (another major centralised crypto exchange) token price flash crash, with the US proposing a 30% tax on electricity used for mining and finally with Silicon Valley Bank closing withdrawals. The last thing theoretically shouldn’t have had an impact on crypto, the said bank being one that’s focused on doing business primarily with Web2 clients. Unfortunately, Circle, the company behind USDC, acknowledged that around 8% of its assets are in Silicon Valley Bank deposits.  This produced the de-peg of USDC, which is still lasting, even if the risk of total madness seems to have passed, with USDC slowly regaining its peg.

What do all of the above have in common? The “money” part of the blockchain. Now, take this part as an opinion piece, separated by the rest of the weekly report, or whatever, but I feel the need to vent out a bit. From the moment I first heard of crypto, more than a decade ago, until I started to research the phenomenon, and then basically until now, I have very few recollections of net good outcomes from stories that involve only the financial mechanisms of crypto. Maybe it’s the moment to finally change the narrative altogether. Ok, money is good as a means to an end, tokens are necessary and network economics have their importance, but what if we are actually starting to build the technology that Web2 can’t deliver? Whenever I open certain social media platforms, I feel like in the scene with the prophets from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Everyone is preaching about impending doom, or unseen riches, or an exalted new golden era that will enforce “the freedom to transact”.

In this scenery, Arweave eco starts to deliver an increasingly more refined set of tools and products, bit by bit, that are focused more than anything on data as the primary source of relevance. While the financial world was shaking, arweavers continued their journey, hopefully ending with making the Permaweb coincide with the web. If blockchain prevails, it will be because of its implementations that have on their core generic, large sets of immutable data, not tiny accountant ledgers.

I. Arweave Network

Arweave 2.6 – we have liftoff!

As you should already know from our previous articles, this week was the first one that saw the 2.6 version of Arweave being live on the mainnet. For the casual user, the experience is almost the same, mainly because the 2.6 version was built more with the future in mind than to answer short-term issues. So, when the weave is in the Petabytes territory and affordable and efficient rigs will conduct the “heavy lifting”, thank the developers that worked on the 2.6 version for thinking in advance. Also, the 2.6 version came with a novel dynamic pricing system. Some may point out that this pricing system brought a rather steep increase in the price of storage on Arweave. While this observation is correct, consider it as an act of justice for the miners – an important part of the puzzle that makes Arweave whole.

The composable web in the making

On the ninth of March, almost the entire Arweave ecosystem was present in GatherTown at the call of the Forward Research team. A lot was discussed there, and we’ll probably release a report that will focus entirely on this event, but a topic clearly distinguished itself from the others, and believe me, this means something. This is because all the topics brought into the light were of utmost importance for the future of the network.

Sam, the co-founder of Arweave and the head of Forward Research, presented, on the basis of ANS-105 standard (license tags), the birth of “Open Data License”, an initiative in collaboration with Creative Commons.

This initiative not only has the potential to create incentive alignment in creating an open data lake, but it answers a problem that creators have had since the beginning of web content production. Content creators can directly monetise their content to the actual consumers, disregarding the application that serves the content, or they can make it available for free, it is up to them, the possibilities of personalising their own terms of the license are almost endless.

Remember the not-so-distant days of NFT “fuzziness” where people were left in the dark about what they actually get with the token? Those are about to become relics of an ancient past. In the future, each piece of data that composes the Permaweb can have its license attached to it. Everyone will know what the rights of the owner are and under which circumstance, and to what extent that data can be used. Hopefully, this is just the first step towards the DataOS.

II. Arweave Ecosystem

ArDrive is ready to upload your biggest files to the permaweb!

This week, ArDrive announced the release of version 1.44 of their ArDrive-App, which introduces a major new feature: large public file uploads without any size limit! Previously, file uploads had a limit of 1.192GiB due to browser restrictions, but the new update removes those limits for public uploads, enabling users to share and store files of any size on the platform.

The team has tested the new feature with files up to 10GB, so unless you’re Steven Spielberg and want to store your latest movie on the permaweb, all your needs should be covered. And on the off chance that Steven is reading this and considering using the permaweb, just reach out to the ArDrive team. The team will certainly find a custom solution for you.

While the feature is currently available only for public file uploads, the Ardrive team has announced that this feature will soon extend to private drives as well. And for those who are using the ArDrive CLI, don’t worry! The team told us that they’re just about ready to increase the limits for that as well.

In the meantime, give the new feature a try and share your feedback with the team. We’re excited to see what media you’ll be storing on ArDrive now!

Are you ready to Archive the Web?

We got super excited when we got wind of a new project release this week! Especially since Archive the Web plays right into the strengths and ethos of our ecosystem – the first open and decentralised internet archive built on Arweave! It seems the team has been working on the project since ETHLisbon and are now ready to share with us the alpha version of Archive the Web. We won’t even bother telling you what the project does, as their name already takes care of that.

Some might wonder why would we need to archive the web? Well, just consider that the average website is altered or deleted after only 92 days. Seems a bit short, doesn’t it? And we won’t even go into censorship attempts, people attempting to cover up how they were supporters of FTX and other shady behaviour.

The alpha release of Archive the Web already offers users the ability to take website snapshots, archive a single page and explore and replay archived sites! One caveat is that the current release is limited to only 3 days for long-term archiving of webpages, as the team is still in testing mode and wants to ensure everything works as intended.

Naturally, you pay for all your archives with AR, so get ready to spend some of that well-protected stash of yours and archive your most important and beloved piece of the Web! All you need to do, is head over to Archive the Web and input your URL.

The Permaweb got a new Cookbook!

This past week, Only Arweave announced the release of the Permaweb Cookbook 2.0, an exciting update to the best onboarding resource for developers and builders! The Cookbook is the ultimate reference guide for anyone who wants to learn about Arweave and its decentralised technology.

With an upgraded design and enhanced functionality, the Permaweb Cookbook 2.0 is a community-driven project that offers new builders easy navigation through the high-level concepts of Arweave, as well as in-depth documentation on specific features and functionalities. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just getting started with Arweave, the Cookbook is the perfect place to find the information you need to build decentralised applications on the permaweb.

And not only is the Permaweb Cookbook 2.0 a great resource for developers, but it’s also mobile-optimised for building on the go! You can easily access the Cookbook from your mobile device and learn everything about Arweave while on the subway or at your favourite coffee shop.

So, what are you waiting for? Head on over to https://cookbook.arweave.dev/ and start buidling!

Facts are coming to WordPress everywhere!

Have you heard about fact markets? We reckon you do, as Permafacts has been doing a great job developing and introducing the wider community to the solution they have created for objectively assessing the validity of the information. And now, with their latest release, fact markets can be incorporated in any WordPress site through the plugin they developed!

Do you happen to know how many websites on the world wide web use WordPress? You might be surprised, but 43.1% of all websites are built using WordPress, so this new release really opens up the possibilities for Permacast. Almost half of the world’s websites can now use a fact market to correctly evaluate how accurate and trust-worthy their content is. If that isn’t a major development, then we don’t know what is.

Check out the team’s reaction below when launching the plugin on the first WordPress site and be sure to follow them to discover how you can incorporate fact markets for your website!

A Permaweb competitor for WordPress emerges

Yes, you are right, we just talked about fact markets on WordPress and now we’re doing a segway to tell you about their competition! No, not Permaswap’s competition, there’s no one who would dare compete with them…

For those that are not aware, WordPress is a Content management system, or CMS for short. CMS is the technology that enables developers to quickly build blogs and websites, without needing to develop these from the ground up. And you don’t even need to be a developer; anyone can spin up a quick instance of WordPress and create a personal blog, or an online store, or a news website, or a platform for checking the weather, or anything else their heart might desire. A long list of or’s, right? But that’s the beauty of a CMS, they really do enable users to build a lot of cool projects quicker and with less overhead. There had to be a reason why WordPress powers 43.1% of the world’s websites…

Until now, the main disadvantage of using a CMS is that it was powered and hosted by traditional Web2 technologies, and of course, the usual Web2 hosting providers. We’re thrilled to let you know that is no longer the case starting this week, with the announcement of Urchin! Urchin is a headless CMS, built using Solana, Bundlr and of course, Arweave!

Some of you might wonder what the headless in headless CMS means. And we’re here to tell you. A headless CMS doesn’t impose a front-end, so you have the flexibility of designing the user interface however you’d like, while also having the ease of mind that the CMS is managing all your content needs on the back-end.

Now, do we still need to tell you how big of a deal the release of a CMS built on top of Arweave is? We’re guessing not, but we’ll still reiterate for ourselves. Users can now build their websites easily without needing to code anything and still get their all their content hosted on the permaweb in an easy and intuitive manner! So why are you still here? Go check out Urcin and get ready to build your great idea directly on Arweave.

Why Arweave? by 4EVERLAND

The Arweave ecosystem has caught the Twitter Spaces bug! And yes, that’s also a pun on how many bugs Twitter Spaces has… But coming back to our main subject, we’re thrilled to report that 4EVERLAND has announced a new series of Twitter Spaces aimed at better understanding Arweave and the technology they use to enable users to host their infrastructure on the permaweb.

They have some great guests lined up and also some great co-hosts joining them! Disclaimer: Arweave News is one of the co-hosts, but we’re still being fully objective (or subjective, we never got the hang of which one is better).

The first episode of the series is entitled “Giant on Arweave”. Great name, if you ask us… So be sure to check out all the details in their announcement and join us for the Space to get all your question about Arweave and 4EVERLAND answered in an engaging format.

P.S. We heard there might also be some giveaways from 4EVERLAND, but we’ll let you discover on your own what those are…

Permaswap & PSTs – an eternal love story begins

Yes, you read that right, Permaswap and PSTs! The team has just announced the first PST token to be traded on their DEX. Which one is it? Is the suspense torturing you? We know you want to know.

Well, we’re glad to tell you it’s $ArDrive, the token behind your favourite decentralised, permaweb storage app! The team has let us know that the token will start trading in the $ArDrive/$AR Pair during the month of March and users will also be able to provide liquidity for the pair!

During the beta phase of Permaswap, users that want to provide liquidity will need to have an everPay balance exceeding $2,000 in order to ensure a stable trading experience. So, if you qualify, just fill out their LP application form here and the team will whitelist you in a maximum of 24 hours.

We’re more than excited to see trading for the first PST being launched on Permaswap, and we know you are as well. So be sure to get your tokens ready and follow Permaswap to be the first to find out when you can trade your $ArDrive!

III. Things you won’t encounter on Arweave

This time we’ll try to showcase what Arweave could have done better than the current way of doing things, and for that, we’ll plunge into the depths of a political scandal.

And here we are, asking for censorship in the name of preserving democracy and truth. If you don’t know the context, this editorial may shed some light on what happened. We don’t want to address at all the political side of the story, even if it seems that it’s all about politics, we just see it this way: somewhere, there are 40000 hours of video recordings of what happened during the storming of the Capitol building. Right now, this vast repository is kept away from the public eye. A small part of this repository apparently leaked, and it seems that it contradicts the established narrative. The questions just start to emerge: is the released content original, and does it reflect the truth? What are the guarantees, if the entire data set will be released to the public, that the released content represents all the footage and that it wasn’t tampered with?

Imagine that all those video feeds would have been sent directly to Arweave. Even if they would have been encrypted, everybody would have known that the data set wouldn’t have been tampered with. Also, the release to the public would have been as simple as sharing the decryption key. Governments should start to consider more often the possibility of offering their citizens the certainty of immutability. The age of trust between state and citizen ended long ago. States are spying on us because they don’t believe that we “behave”.  Why shouldn’t we be able to “spy” on the actions of the state as well?

Until we’ll see immutable storage embedded in state-owned servers, we hope that we can see at least most of the repository released and safely stored on Arweave. It will be a bonanza for researchers.

IV. Arweave explained by George Orwell – thanks to ChatGPT

In a world where Big Brother watches and controls everything, where history is constantly rewritten and the truth is hard to find, Arweave 2.6 brings a glimmer of hope.

With its decentralized, permanent and tamper-proof storage of information, Arweave 2.6 ensures that once something is stored on the network, it cannot be altered or deleted. This means that even in a world where the ruling party changes history at will, the truth can still be found and preserved.

Arweave is a beacon of hope for those seeking to preserve truth and promote a fair and open society. It shows that even in a world where power is concentrated in the hands of the few, technology can still provide a path towards decentralization, transparency, and freedom.

V. ICYMI

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Pierre

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

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