Tuesday, April 23, 2024
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2023-01-05
By Pierre
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The Arweave Ecosystem Annual Report 2022

We are at the beginning of a new year and what will happen is yet to be revealed. Of course, we have our expectations about the future, but the veil is still thick. Instead of making predictions about what lies ahead of us, maybe it is a good time to try and see what we accomplished as an ecosystem in the past year. 

While doing the yearly recap, we struggled to find a meaningful way on how to frame 2022. We could have published some neat charts, after all, the figures are impressive: from under 8 TB the blockweave grew to way over 100 TB in the last year. Still, we felt that an approach like this wouldn’t reflect the sheer scale of Arweave. Numbers and charts tend to abstract too much of the human element involved in the creation of that growth. 

We came up with the most basic solution: an endless thread of entries from our previous weekly reports. Even if this represents a mere selection of what we thought to be the most relevant news from all the last year’s weekly reports (which in turn are just a selection from all the news that appears on any given week), we ended up with over 100 entries. 

Probably for each piece of news highlighted, there are at least five equally important that didn’t manage to end up here, and for those, we apologise. 

Look at this collection as at the peak of the iceberg – a tiny visible spot of concentrated work that was done through an entire year by countless members of this ecosystem. Days and nights of passion were poured into each new feature announced by Arweave’s projects. 

From January to December, the ecosystem never stopped pushing forward and building the new web. At any given moment, there was an arweaver in Asia, America, Africa, Australia, or Europe awake and thinking about how to improve something on the Permaweb. For all who identify as part of this community – we salute you!

Without further ado, as a way to embody the scale of Arweave, behold our meager yearly recap:

January

3em launches as a rapid multi-language execution machine for SmartWeave

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Verto had a groundbreaking week with the incubation and release of 3em – a multi-language smart contract execution layer for Arweave. 3em allows developers writing in Solidity, Rust, C, and other languages to build and read Arweave smart contracts. You can read all we know so far here.

RedStone Smart Contracts v4.1 brings 10x performance gains for SmartWeave

As well as Verto, RedStone has been hard at work with optimizations to SmartWeave. The latest version of the SDK behind the team’s own oracle app performs up to 10x faster than the previous release. On Twitter, RedStone challenged us to try to benchmark the SDK for ourselves.

RedStone’s SmartWeave Scanner develops further

After the integration with ArCode Studio (a tool that allows users to explore, deploy and interact with SmartWeave contracts) that took place earlier this year, RedStone unleashes the full power of this tool by allowing users to log into the scanner with ArConnect or Finnie. While connected, a user can deploy a new smart contract or write new interactions to older SmartWeaves.

everPay launches a SmartWeave-based NFT auction

everPay launches its first auction on Arweave. The auction is completely gasless as it is stored on Arweave and paid for in $AR. Whilst being the classic ascending dynamic auction, it has a twist – whoever is outbid receives an extra 2% of their own bid.

There are a total of 9 auctions and it’s running from the 6th to 13th of January. Read more about the auction and its mechanics here. And until the 1oth of January you can guess what price the Santa will be auctioned at to get a chance to win 1AR:

Verto announces new UI

Verto releases a sneak peek of ArConnect’s new UI, which is more closely in key with Verto’s recent rebrand. With swap nearing completion and ArConnect being improved all the time, we’re keeping a close eye on what Verto does next!

Sarcophagus raises 5.4m in funding

The decentralised dead man’s switch built atop Arweave and Ethereum, Sarcophagus DAO, closed a 5.4m round of funding this week from investors such as Placeholder, Greenfield One and Arweave. Notably, this round was conducted through the DAO itself, with funding proposals and votes submitted via Aragon, and funds locked into the DAO’s multisig automatically.

Read our full report here.

Arweave’s family tree gets bigger

In another boost to the Arweave ecosystem, is the launch of ArCode Studio. It’s a tool that allows users to easily deploy and interact with Smartweave contracts. Users can also view the state of contracts that are registered as safe, post real interactions or perform dry runs.

Shortly after the ArCode’s launch, the RedStone scanner integrated it with its contract explorer. The integration enables contracts loaded on RedStone’s scanner to be immediately ready to explore.

Behold, the future of music NFTs!

Releap made an entry into the music NFT space this week with its creator describing it as a creative platform to empower artists with new tools to engage fans in a new way. It helps artists get direct contributions from fans through a reward system set by the artists themselves without third-party interference. It is built on Arweave and Solana.

AR is listed on XT.COM

On 26 January XT.COM started the deposit and trading of AR. With a daily volume of near $700m, and over 300.000 monthly active users, XT.COM could represent a gateway for onboarding new adopters of Arweave’s coin. On 27 January, the second day of trading the AR volume traded on this exchange was already at over 24k.

February

Sarco Releases New v2.0 Roadmap

Sarcophagus DAO – known for its “Dead Man’s Switch” protocol – recently received a whole lot of funding. Now it seems they are pushing ahead with a new roadmap outlining their future plans to rework their smart contracts and build a robust test suite.

CyberTime and Redstone

CyberTime– the NFT marketplace on CELO – announced that they will be integrating RedStone’s pricing feeds as well as their pseudo-number generator. This will allow a more fair distribution of NFTs to the users by increasing randomness.

RedStone also gave us an in depth explanation of how they are bundling up transactions using Bundlr in order to achieve higher throughput and transactions per second.

everFinance releases an explorer for everPay data

This week, Arweave-Ethereum cross-chain DEX everPay has launched a way to explore transactions and statistics processed by their platform. The stats reveal that the total value locked on everPay is around $2.3m USD.

everPay open-sources Python SDK

everPay, a cross-chain DEX for AR, has made their everpay.py SDK available to the public. The SDK underwent testing as the code that powered everPay’s Winston Family NFT auction.

3em.js launches to the public

3em, an optimized execution machine for SmartWeave contracts written in Rust, has launched an easy way to integrate with JavaScript projects. 3em.js published documentation on the JS library here.

KYVE releases 2022 roadmap

The much-awaited news on a timeline for KYVE’s incentivized testnet launch is here – Q1 2022. Following the testnet, KYVE will look to launch mainnet somewhere between Q3 and Q4. Check the thread below for the full picture:

Open Web Foundry kicks off

Yesterday we saw the kick off of the 6th edition of the Open Web Foundry, Arweave’s very own incubating initiative that helps projects get funded and off the ground. We’ve been hyping about the new OWF for a while now and were very excited to see it finally take shape. We’ll be keeping a close eye and reporting on what we see!

5 new Open Web Foundry projects revealed in the third Community Spotlight

 

A fresh crop of Arweave ecosystem projects is being incubated as part of the sixth installment of Open Web Foundry. Watch to see pitches from 4EVERLAND, Blinds, Uniiku, Shareweave and Ubikom.

Redstone launches SonAR SmartWeave explorer rebrand

RedStone’s SonAR is a way to dig into the activity around SmartWeave contracts and PSTs. Sometimes, it can be hard to stumble upon what’s hot in the ecosystem or get analytics on contract / token activity, but SonAR labels the major Arweave ecosystem contracts to make it easy to read and discover what’s getting used, and how.

Pianty releases new fiat payments methods

To make it easier to onboard new users, Pianity allows the purchase of NFTs with fiat – a layer of abstraction for processing the crypto payments in the background that bypasses the need for the user to have a wallet.

Hundreds of thousands of documents from the Ukraine/Russia conflict are archived on the permaweb

Following a $100k flash grant program announced by the Arweave core team, developer Andreas Pirela has built a JS tool to query NewsAPI.org and push each matching story to the permaweb.

Beyond Pirela’s work, Sam Williams confirmed that over 400,000 artifacts from the crisis have been stored on chain, and that Arweave block explorer ViewBlock has built a custom page to explore the uploads.

Joining in the archiving efforts, Bundlr has built a way to rapidly archive relevant tweets and articles:

Over five million Russia-Ukraine artifacts are archived on Arweave

There are now over five million contents on the Russia-Ukraine war archived on Arweave’s permaweb. The effort was launched a week ago when Arweave’s founder, Sam Williams, announced a $100,000 grant. The contents, including videos, pictures and web links will be stored for 200 years and could potentially be used for research and investigation purposes as the crisis degenerates into a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Projects in the Arweave ecosystem, including Bundlr, contributed to help make the archiving project a reality.

RSS3 debuts governance, integrates Avalanche

Following its first major token sale, which saw $RSS3 tokens make it into the hands of a wide group of people, RSS3 will undergo its debut DAO governance vote, with an NFT reward for participants. The team announced today on its Notion site how the tokens have been distributed and the voting weight each token type has.

Earlier this week, RSS3 announced content and data indexing for the Avalanche C-Chain, meaning NFTs and activity from AVAX dApps will now appear in a user’s profile feed.

ArDrive now shows file and folder count in the info panel

ArDrive has just released a much-requested feature that makes it easier to know how many files and folders are in a drive.

Handshake between Arweave and NFTs

During the week, there was a partnership agreement between the Arweave ecosystem and the nonfungible token or NFTs space. This time, it’s between Meson Network, a bandwidth market place and ‘Show me’, a subscription NFT social network built on Web3. The emergence of Meson Network gives ShowMe more choices in carrying more content formats, Meson Network said.

Also in the NFT space, Mintbase, an NFT marketplace that built its database on Arweave, deployed its 1000th smart contract and to celebrate, it put to use its ‘transfer store ownership feature’.

New tool, new token: Bundlr has been busy

The Bundlr team has built an archiving tool that will allow permanent storage of content from Twitter to Arweave using the Bundlr network. In partnership with Arweave, Bundlr has announced a 10,000 USDC grant for developers who can integrate the tool with VK, Russia’s biggest social media platform.

“Would surely increase Bundlr TX flow, as well as help make Arweave a more complete archive of the issues people care about,” Williams wrote in a tweet referring to the tool.

Data upload to Arweave via Bundlr can now be paid for with Boba token. That’s another way to make accessing the permaweb easy for all.

Spheron celebrates its scorecard

Fifty days into 2022 and Spheron, an Arweave-based application hosting tool which allows developers link Github repository to a custom domain and have the application built and deployed to the permaweb, is already counting its achievements. Its users have grown 10 percent and projects increased by 29 percent.

Redstone takes data accessibility to Celo

Taking with it over 1,000 price feeds data for crypto and real-world assets, Redstone Finance has partnered with Celo blockchain. This comes two months after Redstone participated in the DeFi for the People Hackathon and won the Interoperability Track.  The partnership, according to Marcin Karmierczak, Head of Growth at RedStone, aims “to onboard users who haven’t yet interacted with crypto, like citizens of developing countries and socially excluded communities.”

Koii offers $1m USD in grants

A $1million grant will be distributed to developers who can build projects in three categories, including communication tools, financial applications and innovative on-boarding methods, for the Koii network.

March

Files from the Russian invasion of Ukraine continued to be stored

Last week the counter was around 5 million files. At the moment of writing this article, there are over 12.5 million files stored. Arweavers will never stop recording everything. There will be no clean slate for those involved, no retractions, no unwanted files deleted, just raw data waiting to be scrutinized by the court of Hague.

The entire effort made by the Arweave team didn’t remain unseen. Sam Williams, Arweave’s founder, was asked by Bloomberg TV to explain the initiative:

Likewise, another member of our community, Andres Pirela, a developer at Verto, explained how Arweave works in the context of data preservation in an article for Forbes.

The community rallied to further expand the sources from where the information about the war are extracted

Decent.land, the Web3 social layer, an Arweave native project, participated in the joint effort by offering a proof of concept meant to achieve data from Reddit.

ArDrive announced the launch of AR.I/O Network and raised 17 million $ to operationalize it

This project represents a grand milestone through decentralisation for the entire Arweave ecosystem. The importance of AR.I/O Network could be understood by the magnitude of the funds raised and by the backers that led the round: Arweave Team, Blockchain Capital, and Sino Global Capital. We had an exclusive on these news so you can read the whole story here.

Pianity raised $6.5 million in the seed round

Pianity, one of the players from the incipient music NFT industry announced the end of their seed round:

led byDigital Renaissance Foundation, Big Brain Holdings, and Longhash Ventures, with participation from IOSG; LD Capital; Sebastien Borget, co-founder and COO at TheSandBox; ViaBTC; ArkStream Capital; Arweave; and Ronny Shibley, CTO and co-founder at Gorillas.

Let’s hope that the world will settle and will let the future sound good again. At least we know that Pianity will have the means to provide the beats!

KYVE Network released its third protocol update

This update focuses on the KYVE DAO and further decentralisation of the governance and delegation process. They also worked on improving the nodes’ infrastructure by diminishing the amount of data stored in memory. For further explanations you can check their Medium article.

“With this latest release, we have taken yet another step towards fully decentralising the KYVE protocol — as well as bringing us closer to mainnet stability,” said KYVE co-founder John Letey.

Bybit listed RSS3

Bybit, a crypto exchange with almost 9 billion $ daily traded volume, that defines itself as one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges, listed RSS3, RSS3 represents the counterpart of RSS built for the Web3.

RSS3 Protocol defines the format of information presence and communication, and through the protocol, users store signed information to decentralised RSS3 Network, including profile, link, note and asset, where note and asset include not only signed content published by users themselves, but also content automatically indexed from other networks. Details of the RSS3 Protocol can be found here.

EverFinance now supports PSTs too

EverFinance, the cross-chain DeFi protocol that uses the power of Arweave to deliver feeless and instant transactions showcased again the use of SCP (storage-based consensus protocol, a protocol created by them) in enabling support for profit-sharing tokens too through EverPay dApp. In order to better understand the underlying tech, we recommend checking this article.

Open Web Foundry Final Community Spotlight

What an amazing week it has been in the ecosystem with the Open Web Foundry (OWF) showcasing many new projects. Our own Pierre will be reporting on all these awesome new projects soon, so stay tuned! Be sure not to miss the final OWF Community spotlight event today at 6 pm CET.

Verto partners with Arweave Team and Bundlr Network

Verto Exchange partner up with the Arweave core team and Bundlr Network to offer free uploads of 100kB or less to Arweave’s Permaweb via the ArConnect browser extension wallet.

Sarchophagus’s leadership conversations go public

The Sarcophagus team has moved all the conversations they would normally be made between themselves to a public Discord server so anyone can see the developments and give their own ideas. As well as joining in on Discord, you can listen to the DAO’s past team calls on permacast here.

RedStone launches RedStone Academy to teach Web3

RedStone Finance launches its RedStone Academy, which is focused on helping people of all backgrounds jump in to learn how to develop their own SmartWeave smart contracts on Arweave using the RedStone SmartWeave SDK.

Akord raises $2.3 million in an investment round to further their development

Social vault platform Akord has raised a $2.3m seed round to build an Arweave-backed permanent storage solution for digital heritage. Backers include Maven11, D1 and Arweave. Also on the list is SevenX ventures – a fund with vast ecosystem experience and a portfolio that includes ArDrive, Koii, everFinance and Spheron.

ANS domains airdropped to the Arweave community

Arweave name service domains were airdropped to 513 community members by Web3 social protocol decent.land. Users of Verto ID and alpha testers of the original decent.land protocol are among those eligible for airdrop.

The team is working to ensure ANS domains are displayed on Verto Exchange and ViewBlock instead of wallet addresses. Incentive mechanisms for people to earn passive income for holding ANS domain will be available in the mainnet, the team said.

Build a permaweb app, get $100,000 investment

Developers and engineers with permaweb ideas can now build on Arweave with $100,000 investment support. The developer gets cash support at every stage from building the app  and pitching the idea to raising external funding.

Over 24 million Russia-Ukraine pieces of war content archived on Arweave

As the war rages in Ukraine with devastating impact, more documents are preserved. There are over 24million pieces of content including text, video and pictures stored permanently.

RSS3 airdrops tokens to early adopters

RSS3, an open information syndication protocol that aims to support efficient and decentralised information distribution in Web3 announced an incentive airdrop for the community it says would continue for seven days.

Developers and engineers with permaweb ideas can now build on Arweave with $100,000 investment support. The developer gets cash support at every stage from building the app  and pitching the idea to raising external funding.

April

OWF Demo Day Concludes

Demo Day has arrived! Yesterday, 31th March, was the day we had all been waiting for, the Open Web Foundry Demo Day concluded.

Over the course of the past weeks many new projects came to the Arweave Ecosystem. Yesterday the finalists showed off what they had been working on. Our journalist, Pierre, will soon be diving into all the new projects, so stay tuned!

Arweave’s founder, Sam Williams, puts things into perspective for everyone:

everFinance partners with Huobi

First up is everFinance, who have just acquired a fancy new partner.

everFinance auction goes live and breaks the internet

The latest everFinance auction went live yesterday, and soon after, the auction crashed. This is not a bad thing, this is a good thing, as it shows a massive increase in adoption.

everFinance has assured everyone that any (temporarily) missing funds – that were locked due to the bidding mechanism – from their wallets will be returned.

The auction will now take place today, the 1st of April. No, this is not an April fools joke!

everPay integrates MathWallet

MathWallet, a multi-chain mobile crypto wallet, announced the support for $AR some weeks ago. It was a no-brainer that Arweave native dApps would adopt this new access point to the Arweave ecosystem. Still, everPay pleasantly surprised us by how quickly they achieved the integration.

everPay is a project of everFinance, Arweave’s layer two network that enables feeless, instant transactions, and enables cross-chain payments.

Akord notes are here

And you can start using them today. As you would expect on a high efficiency Blockchain, like Arweave, the fees are low! Go check it out!

Releap launches beta version for music NFT product

Before now, when you hear of NFTs, what comes to mind are pictures and gaming assets, but music has now been brought to NFT platform. Releap, the firm behind the innovation, unveiled Releap Launch to help musicians debut their work using Solana and Releap Studio, helping creators mint NFTs with audio and visual metadata. The metadata of NFTs is stored on Arweave.

RedStone’s WASM is here

And the moment the core developers at RedStone have been anticipating – Redstone WASM contracts are now live. WASM support is officially here.

Go devs, go!

Anticipate The Graph’s support for Arweave

The Graph, an indexing protocol and global API for organizing data on the blockchain, helping users to sort through massive data sets to find the information they need, has announced that it was planning to provide support for Arweave. The integration will help make Arweave’s stored data more readable, organised and more accessible.

Bundlr handles 98% of data uploads to Arweave

Call it one of the most successful projects on Arweave, and you won’t be wrong. In 11 months, Bundlr has grown to handle 98 percent of Arweave data uploads. Bundlr said it was able to contribute to the growth of Arweave by scaling its transaction per second, TPS, allowing more data to be uploaded to Arweave at any given time.

Bundlr did it again!

Bundlr (the aggregator that works on top of the Arweave network and is responsible for over 90% of its transactions) integrated AVAX payments. This step means that Avalanche native dApps could use Arweave storage and pay in their native coin from now on for Arweave storage. We are starting to wonder how many Layer 1 chains are not yet linked with the Permaweb.

KYVE now has its own security and nodes

KYVE Network has said it launched a Cosmos SDK-based chain, which makes it a layer 1 that has its own security and nodes.

Pianity users to get secondary market

Pianity opens a secondary market, and one of its features will help collectors decide whether they want fixed or auction prices when they resell NFTs.

Public vault coming to Akord

Akord, a permanent storage on Arweave is building building public vaults. When it is launched, users can mint NFTs by uploading to their public Akord vault.

Decent.land launched its new blog besides a new product update

Decent.land, the project that aims to become the social layer of Web3, inaugurated its blog by presenting a new product update that covered the aftermaths of its ANS genesis domains airdrop and the launch of the first chapter in the decent.land DAO handbook – The History of DAOs

decent.land releases update that hints at the protocol’s future

It’s a beehive of activities at Decent. Land this week as it continues implementing new product development strategies, a blog post by the company shows. It appointed an Art Director, Lee Tyrrell, to work on the specifications for decent.land’s collection of ancient land NFTs. Other developments touch on the Arweave Name Service and smart contract upgrade for improved performance.

ArDrive has some nice stuff going on here

Firstly and foremost, the ArDrive community voted to pass Inferno.Inferno is a usage rewards program for the ArDrive Dust token designed to reward users with ↁ tokens for uploading data through the ArDrive suite of apps. And now, ArDrive has “gone international”!

With version 1.13.0 of ArDrive Web, if your browser’s settings point to a Spanish-speaking locale, a Spanish-translated version of the app will be displayed! Pretty amazing stuff! Don’t worry, guys, there are more languages on the way too.

Lastly, ArDrive has partnered with @mynaaccountants Web3 stack, in a bid to take ArDrive to an enterprise level.

Mintbase Funding

More funds were raised! This time it’s Mintbase! It seems the entire Arweave ecosystem has been on a roll recently.

A whopping $7.5M was raised from VCs in a round led by Woodstock, and at the same time are offering a $5M Grants Pool for projects built using Mintbase + NEAR. Oh, they also launched a new frontend.

Gitopia LORE

The Gitopia Janus Testnet has launched. Gitopia is marking the occasion with The Game of LORE. Participants will be rewarded with points that will later determine the number of LORE tokens they can receive when the Mainnet launches.3,250,000 LORE tokens will be given to participants!

The seal of permanence

Arweave announced the seal of permanence, a symbol that allows developers to show users of their applications that data is securely stored on the permaweb. For developers, this won’t just be a cool badge; it assures users of their capacity. And for users, it gives them the confidence that nothing jeopardizes their data.

May

Bundlr successfully concludes its seed round

Bundlr, the powerhouse that scales Arweave and makes it accessible throughout multiple layer 1 solutions, finalized its seeding round. The team managed to raise $5.2 million.

These news makes us realize what the “we are still early” statement truly means. We forgot that Bundlr, the instrument that is responsible for over 90% of Arweave transactions, is only one year old and they managed to achieve all these results before ending their seed round. “Exciting” would be an understatement when describing what’s yet to come.

KYVE Network launched KORELLIA, its incentivized testnet

KYVE is a project that enables data providers to standardize, validate, and permanently store data streams. Obviously, the permanent storage is provided by Arweave, while the standardization and validation will be the responsibility of KYVE’s own network.

Another step was made by KYVE Network in their quest to fulfill this goal. KORELLIA is now up and running for everyone who wants to test it in exchange for some juicy rewards.

In the simplest of terms, KYVE’s incentivized testnet will enable our team to test and verify how different aspects of the KYVE Network are functioning and how they can be improved for our community members. We will use all the data we gather from our incentivized testnet to improve the KYVE Network, ensuring we are providing the KYVE community with the best possible decentralised data lake experience.

Metaforo, leveraging everFinance tech, released a Discord tipping bot

Metaforo, a platform that is offering out-of-the-box solutions for DAOs management, launched a tipping bot. While the implementation could seem minor, it has the potential to greatly empower the cohesion of emerging communities.

We’ve seen it at work in everFinance’s Discord server and it’s pretty straightforward:

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ArDrive launched its new Mining Reward Program – Inferno

Probably for many of you, ArDrive is synonym to permanently storing your life snippets captured in digital format – from family pictures to goofy clips featuring your dog or the first steps of your toddler.

Now, besides your urge to safely store those moments, ArDrive incentivizes you with a program that will be running for the next 20 weeks. Upload more than 1 GB of data in a week and you may be eligible for a reward in ArDrive tokens.

In order to reduce the grinding of manually uploading a couple of hundred pictures to reach that sweet spot of 1 GB, the announcement of INFERNO program was paired with adding a new functionality: now you can directly upload whole folders.

Bundlr reaches 200.000 million TXs threshold

The inevitable has happened. Bundlr surpassed 200 million transactions. All the integrations they made with other ecosystems, the scaling they provided by making Arweave transactions exponentially faster, the “gasless” transactions for TXs under 300 kb – all of this converged into achieving this goal. From a total of approximately 245 million TXs on Arweave, Bundlr is responsible for over 200. I don’t know if you can ask more from a project that’s only a year old.

Bundlr integration with zkSync

It seems that there isn’t a week without a new Bundlr integration. Will they ever stop? Do we want them to stop? Hell no. Let them spread permanence throughout the entire Web3. This week it was zkSync‘s turn to integrate with Bundlr. Now the users of zkSync, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, can pay for Arweave storage directly in their native token. We already covered this event in a dedicated piece, so if you want to know more, access this link.

Pianity conducted a facelift

Pianity, one of the leading marketplaces when it comes to music NFTs, conducted a series of changes on both its song page and its music player. One could say artists have always been obsessed with aesthetics. Well, these changes are definitely not only made to beautify their product. It’s obvious that they’ve put a lot of effort into delivering a better and seamless experience for the final user. If you want to know what new functionalities Pianity released, feel free to check the article linked in their tweet.

RSS3 launched its staking program

RSS3, the data syndication solution for Web3, launched a 365-day-long staking program. Even if we covered the RSS3 project many times, each time we do, we feel like it was never enough to fully explain the complexity and implications of this particular project. Let’s say that it has the potential to create platformless media, truly owned by the content creator.

They are doing this by interconnecting four mechanisms:

  • RSS3 Protocols classify information into four types – profiles, links, assets, and notes
  • RSS3 Apps access and publish data using RSS3 SDKs in the format defined by RSS3 Protocols
  • RSS3 SDKs fetch data from the RSS3 Network and publish data to RSS3 Supported Networks
  • RSS3 Network crawls data from various RSS3 Supported Networks, caches the data into its own efficient database. It also does some pre-processing, such as applying artificial intelligence recommendation algorithms and providing a search function.

With one of the primary sources of data being Arweave itself, it’s obvious why we are paying attention to any development on their part.

Permacast will support videos

Permacast launched its third iteration and the main enhancement is video support. This functionality couldn’t be timed better. In a time when Youtube is terminating accounts without any further notice, Permacast will offer video content creators safe heaven.

Imagine a dApp where you can primarily post your content (disregarding its nature, it could be podcasts or vlogs) without any fear of being de-platformed, and then using RSS feeds to post your content to various platforms. Wait, you don’t have to imagine – it’s already happening thanks to Permacast.

ArDrive introduced a new feature

Apparently, this week was about users and how to enrich their experience while surfing the Permaweb. ArDrive has continued to improve and released image previews inside the App. Now when you are staring at a jpeg file named “ugly.do.not.share03” and it’s not ringing any bells, you can just preview the younger content without having to open what could and up saving you from some embarrassment.

Joking aside, we have to acknowledge that functionalities like this one are paving the road to adoption for the average Web2 user. We have to understand that Web3 can and should offer a decent user experience too, not only data ownership and permanence.

EverFinance announced the Permaswap DEX

We don’t know how to stress the importance of this particular event enough. Since Verto Exchange, the first DEX on Arweave, halted its operations last year after entering an ample redesign of its core functionalities, there was no way to properly trade PSTs inside the Arweave ecosystem. PSTs (profit-sharing tokens) represent the native token standard of Arweave.

Imagine if there would be no way to trade ERC20 tokens on Ethereum? What would happen with the Ethereum chain? Well, we can only speculate on that one, what’s certain is that Arweave thrived under those circumstances because the permanent storage is such a strong proposition on its own. Imagine how the ecosystem will evolve when native projects will be capable to pair the power of permanent storage with the incentives of DeFi on both Permaswap and Verto Exchange.

Permaswap is built by the everFinance team, the initiative that is also responsible for everPay, a layer two solution for Arweave, which represents the core inspiration behind the Permaswap design. You have to understand that Permaswap is not the usual DEX you will find in EVM chains like Ethereum. The technology doesn’t represent a mere fork of older projects packed in a new interface. It’s a totally different beast that will rely on innovations never used before. We recommend you to read both their white paper and the interview we had with Outprog, the founder of everFinance, in order to catch a glimpse of what Permaswap is.

Open Web Foundry #7 just started

On 16 May, the kick-off event that marked the start of the seventh OWF edition took place. For those who don’t know, OWF represents a recurrent program that in a sixth-week period incubates new Arweave projects. When an edition finishes, another one will shortly follow. Almost any given moment, you will find support in getting your idea implemented if you are bold enough to ask. If you like the Arweave ecosystem, now is the moment to become a part of it. You can still apply to OWF right now. What are you waiting for?

Verto Exchange launched the testnet for its new iteration

We are aware that for the entire ecosystem, this is no news anymore. We already covered it in our video reports. Still, their announcement was made 2 hours before we already published our previous weekly report and it simply wouldn’t have been right to not have it pinned for posterity. The moment was so long-awaited that it even generated memes, so yeah, “wen swap?” was finally answered.

Stealthy Permacast mention in WSJ

Wall Street Journal wrote an article about the different use of NFTs as ways to combat censorship via Arweave. Thanks to Permacast we had a peek behind the WSJ paywall. Sometimes, for various reasons, some things remain unsaid. Still, sometimes it is best to point out the “culprit” directly. Why? Because in this case knowing exactly where you can save your content and make it uncensorable could be the only way to save something from oblivion. So here you have it: permacast.dev – they are responsible for permanently preserving and offering access to audio files, and more recently, for preserving video files too.

ArDrive Valet at your service

Are you too posh to create your own crypto wallet or buy crypto as a simple commoner? It’s fine, ArDrive Valet gets you covered. Now you can save your files on Arweave via ArDrive without the need to know anything about Web3. The ArDrive team will conduct the following services on your behalf if you ask them:

Upload hundreds to thousands of files to the Arweave network through ArDrive

Move files from Amazon Web Services, Google Drive or anywhere else and put them on permanent storage

Create a manifest to tag and organise all the headings and metadata for your files

Set up your crypto wallet

Organise your files into Drives

Decent Land took another step toward a decent Web3

Apparently Decent Land entered the last stages of development, delivering weekly consistent product updates. They have a lot brewing, and personally, I have to admit that the lore that’s engulfing the whole project grew on me and made me do unspeakable stuff.

On a more serious note, one of the major updates they presented this week is the profile page for ANS holders, and it looks pretty awesome, don’t you think?

June

The bond between Arweave and the Graph Protocol tightens

A beta integration with the Graph hosted service was announced on 3 June. This represents the last step in a strategic partnership between the two most tech-intensive protocols from the entire Web3. The particular news are somehow related to the ones above. The purpose of the Graph protocol is to offer indexing services for Web3. They are letting developers query different blockchains and publish decentralised APIs that make the data from the chain more accessible for dApps. So, basically, this integration introduces another tool to conduct data discovery and finally retrieval from the Arweave network. If you like to dip your toes into the technical part of this particular integration you can check this link.

The third week of the seventh OWF edition just ended

We will never get tired of mentioning Open Web Foundry‘s endeavors. We won’t rest until every member of the Arweave ecosystem understands what it is and how it can change their life. So, again: OWF is a continuous incubator program for the Arweave ecosystem. One edition ends only to let the next one start. As you may know, we are in the middle of a bear market. This is the perfect moment to build, not to bet your savings in volatile markets. Please let me hold your beer while you are starting your Web3 project on Arweave and try your chances in OWF. They will be always there, open for proposals.

So, what were they up to this week?

As you can see, most of the events already happened. We strongly recommend you follow our Twitter account (link at the bottom of the article) because then you can be notified when they go live so you can join. Until then, if you missed the previous ones, you can see the recordings of Deep Dive #3 and #4. Enjoy.

Huobi’s Incubator Colombo Demo Day was all about Arweave projects

If you paid attention in the past months, you may have noticed that Huobi Incubator showed sustained interest in Arweave’s ecosystem. This culminated with the “Colombo Demo Day”.

Just like Columbus found America across the vast ocean, we want to take the lead and explore Web 3.0’s potential. As a leading incubator in the crypto space, we believe that by providing a continuous open platform to showcase the new emerging trends and projects within, we are able to select quality projects in this industry and help them gain more exposure. The event provides a platform to explore the new boundaries and possibilities with new entrepreneurs in Web 3.0 coming up to challenge the status quo. Together with our partners, we will be providing quality projects with mentorship, funding, resources, and long-term support.

Nine projects from the Arweave ecosystem were selected to showcase their strengths in the event.  One of the particularities of the Colombo Demo Day is that it is happening only once per blockchain. Until now there were only two events in the series, the first one featured Polygon projects and this – Arweave projects. So, in a sense, these 9 projects were the champions of Arweave’s ecosystem in Huobi’s incubator quest for finding the best startups from each chain. You can check their presentations here.

Akord slices prices for permanent storage

While the fees for Arweaves storage are currently at around $4 for 1GB, Akord is offering a huge discount. For the next weeks, they are maintaining the price for storing on Arweave at $3/1GB. Keep in mind that you will pay $3, the price of a coffee, for storing 1GB of data for at least 200 years. Pair this with their new slick UI that makes you forget that you are using a Web3 product, and you’ll have a pretty darn good motivation to at least try the feeling of the Permaweb.

Arweave just turned 4

Four years ago, Arweave was born. That made us realise the paradoxical nature of Arweave. By Web3 standards, it is already an established project. We all know how time warps in the crypto space and a year passed feels like ten in another environment. Most of today’s Ethereum infrastructure was already in place when Ethereum was four years old. Still, taking the time scale Arweave aims for, it is still in its infancy. After the first wave of robust infrastructure settles down and the entire mining mechanism consolidates, migrating to an endowment-based economy, we still won’t be capable of deeming Arweave as finalised. It is a type of project that you know will surpass your life span in its development. All you can do is nurture it until another generation takes the lead. Happy birthday, baby leviathan!

4everland incentivises its community members to participate in the growth of the project

4everland, the project that brings together IPFS and Arweave (besides many other features), launched a community contributor program that will empower any community member to earn rewards for their meaningful work.

4EVERLAND Community Contributor Program aims to encourage more users to get involved in our community development! We see this program to be a users-centered one. So, let’s build a strong, healthy and prosperous Web3 community together!

There are four areas where one can contribute: design and content creation, moderation and localisation, promoting, ideation and feedback.  So, if you feel you can provide value in any of these areas, just give it a try, they are waiting for you.

Akord upgrades its user interface

Akord continues to smooth the edges of its product making permanent storage even more appealing for the casual internet user. This time they presented a preview of how one can experience the media content stored with Akord on the spot. Users could choose between single image or gallery mode, to zoom in and out inside the app, and of course, switch between light and dark mode. While we are mesmerised by the technical implications of Arweave, we usually forget the need for a clean and easy-to-use interface. Akord is one of the projects that constantly reminds us how things should be done in this department.

ArDrive fine-tunes its features

On the same note, ArDrive launched another feature that eases the user experience inside their dApp. They introduced the “eject button”. Now you can easily detach public shared drives from your account. Let them have their own life. Some drives are just made to be free!

KYVE launched KYSOR

In their quest to offer a seamless experience throughout the entire Web3, KYVE launched a feature that will let KYVE nodes run a single program on every pool, disregarding the pool’s standard.

Without KYSOR for every pool, the node runner has to get the binaries manually. If you want to run on another pool which has a different runtime you again have to manually obtain the binaries. Furthermore, if a pool ever upgrades to a newer protocol node version, you have the same procedure as before. Even worse, you might miss the update and receive a timeout slash for being offline.

Running nodes with KYSOR has the following benefits:

  • Only use one program to run on every pool
  • Not installing and compiling protocol binaries manually for every pool
  • Getting the new upgrade binaries during a pool upgrade automatically and therefore don’t risk timeout slashes
  • Make running protocol nodes standardised and easier

RedStone unleashed Warp speeds

RedStone, the project that constantly pushed the standards of SmartWeaves beyond what we thought possible, released its new SmartWeave generation, and it comes with a rebrand too. From now on, RedStone SmarWeaves will be called Warp Contracts, and the Red Stone Academy will become Warp Academy. If you wonder what lies beyond, take your chances space cadet and enroll.

Lit Protocol presents a new way that lets you have end-to-end encryption on Arweave

One of the main concerns regarding blockchain technology, in general, is its open character. Many are afraid that their privacy is at risk because their information is written on a public ledger, hence being available for all. Still, they forget that blockchain is derived from cryptography, and the primary purpose of this science is to transmit secrets in plain sight. Lit Protocol does exactly this: it lets users encrypt static content, upload the encrypted content on Arweave via Bundlr, for example, and then only allow the users who meet the access conditions to see the decrypted content. Check their tutorial and become a cryptographer yourself.

everPay’s NFT auction #8 is on

After the announcement of the Permaswap DEX, the actual use case for the NFTs everPay auctioned during the entire year became apparent. Only holders of everPay NFTs could start providing liquidity in the first phases of Permaswap and mining the Permaswap DEX token in the initial phases. The majority of the already auctioned NFTs are not for sale on the secondary market, and those that are, come with a rather steep price tag. Still, now you have the chance to get a fresh one because once again, they started a new auction, this time in collaboration with ArDrive.

KYVE integrates with Polkadot

KYVE really wants to engulf the entire crypto space. This week was time for Polkadot to reach the shores of the data lake (as KYVE likes to label itself). With each new successful integration, the meaning of their Layer 0 chain claim becomes more apparent. We are probably witnessing the first attempt to merge the Web3 in a single entity, with all the chains computationally linked by KYVE and with all the data permanently stored on Arweave. Who knows how the future will be shaped? Maybe KYVE.

Decent Land launched the Ark protocol

In its product update number 7, Decent Land released, besides other goodies, Ark Protocol. This represents a piece of tech that lets Web3 users link their cross-chain identities. For now, it integrates only with EVM-based chains like Ethereum, but that’s probably only the beginning. As you can see, they are planning quite a complex product:

The major piece of work behind the scenes lately has been on Ark. Ark is a protocol which will power decent.land’s token-gated communities and will be useful for any Arweave-based app that needs to read user data from other chains.

We see Ark as the multichain identity protocol for Web3 social. It integrates with ANS as a universal identity for the permaweb and other chains. When it is live, you will be able to sign into Ark with both your Arweave and Ethereum addresses simultaneously, and link the two in your ANS profile.

This mechanism will make it possible for decent.land token-gated communities to read assets from any chain to allow or deny access to particular groups. We are also already working on a Telegram integration to gate access based on held assets!

Permanotes for perma-devs

This is not the first time we are writing about Permanotes, the creation of @rakis, one of the most dedicated members of Arweave’s community. It looks like it won’t be the last time either. Quality content for developers is starting to pile up. Now they posted a full guide on how to create a Profit Sharing Token, laying down the foundation to create a community and basic tokenomics around your Arweave native project.

KYVE announces the second phase of its incentivised testnet and more

Forever onwards seems to be the undeclared motto of KYVE network. This week marked the entering of the second phase of Korellia, shifting the focus on technical improvements. We hope that the path to mainnet will be a straight one and this critical phase will pass according to schedule.

Given the fact that the second phase of Korellia is one that requires a lot more attention to technical details, one could expect that KYVE expansion has tempered a little. Wrong. They also had the time to integrate with Kusama network. Apparently, they will continue to simultaneously expand their reach and improve their testnet. In this way, when the mainnet will be operational it will be already a fully grown cross-chain entity.

July

ArNS calls for 200 champions

For some time, it was obvious that Arweave, without a permanent link solution, was somehow not capable of unleashing the whole power of the Permaweb. What’s the point of having permanent websites if the path to them is not easily accessible through a natural language string? Until now, if you wanted your website truly permanent you would have gotten a link like this one: https://kszeqgxezf5quhzld4nhpasyilhxphclq2peqi5mrnjhozapmm.arweave.net/VLJIGuTJewofKx8ad4JYQs93nEuGnkgjrIt_Sd2QPYw. Good luck remembering that. From now on, not being a human hard drive is no longer an issue. You can create a normal subdomain name like “Pierre” and every time you will access an Arweave gateway, your subdomain name will point to your permaweb page. It could be your social profile or any other type of static webpage – it could be an entire dApp, you name it. Basically, it shortens any TXid to a readable format.

Actually, there is an already functional dApp called Permapages that will help you set up a lot of different kinds of implementations, just give it a look:

Now, you have to understand that this entire implementation is in its testing phase and the 200 spots are quickly running out. So if you want to be one of the first who will pioneer the use of ArNS – jump on the above tweets, figure out how to enter in AR.IO Discord, and claim the test tokens necessary to run your own subdomain.

By the way, did you know that a similar implementation was already going on inside Decent Land’s ANS? You can check it out here.

Decent Land announced an NFT launch

Decent Land, the Arweave-native take on DAO governance, identity, and social media, published an update to both their core protocols and surrounding NFTs this week. Besides the continuation of their previous efforts, they announced the launch of an exclusive NFT collection. Forty-three “arks” will bring the first settlers to Decent Land. From those, 40 will be available to mint on Ethereum. While the utility of these ships is still to be fully discovered, we couldn’t help but ask for more details about them. Decent Land co-founder Darwin answered:

The Ark NFTs give a hint into the origins of Decent Land’s early settlers and showcase the power of Ark protocol. They will be Ethereum NFTs, so buyers have to link their Ethereum address to their Arweave address in order to claim any future Decent Land airdrops on Arweave. Ark is designed to link Arweave addresses with other chains, and part of that is because Decent Land’s protocols rely on data from chains other than Arweave.

Regarding the utility of holding an Ark NFT, what I can say is that we treat them as VIP passes – especially given the fact that they will be rather scarce. We could provide ANS domain minting passes to Ark owners as further incentives, and we’ll definitely provide holders access to test new Decent Land protocols.

Akord releases public vaults

As you may already know, Akord is probably the most user-friendly dApp in the entire ecosystem when it comes to non-crypto users. The first product iteration focused mostly on privacy and end-to-end data encryption of the files stored on Arweave via Akord. Now they opened the gates for uploading and sharing open data too. No encryption whatsoever, just good old Arweave permanent storage for those files you want to share with the entire world. For more details, you can access our dedicated article.

Glass Protocol has a meaning

If it wasn’t already obvious that Glass Protocol is THE place for music NFTs, now it is. Timbaland, one of the most iconic producers and singers that influenced the millennial generation, stated clearly that he will work with Glass Protocol.

The result of this encounter is the music video “Has a Meaning”. You can read the video description below or you can just directly check it out here.

Grammy Award-winning super-producer, entrepreneur, and music legend Timbaland has now lent his inimitable talent to the Metaverse with the introduction of Congo, his NFT alter ego. Under the Congo alias, Timbaland is releasing the groundbreaking music video, “Has A Meaning”, a collaboration with his protege, Zayd Portillo. Timbaland plays both lead motion capture roles featuring characters from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, all captured within Unreal Engine!

Open Web Foundry #7 just ended

Some days ago OWF7 concluded with its already customary Demo Day. Seven teams were deemed finalists and received the stage to showcase their projects. The definitory trait of this Demo Day seems to be that the majority of the showcased projects are directly related to real-world use. From a project that is trying to clean the world’s waters to a project that helps computers “read” natural language concepts, all the way to a project that is aiming to fix the US healthcare system. They all try to expand the boundaries of what was thought possible through Web3 tech. Please make time and follow the video they linked in its entirety, it will be worth it.

Let’s give a warm welcome to all the participants of this OWF edition, finalists or not, they are now part of the Arweave community. Let’s already prepare for OWF #8.

everFinance never stops

Since the announcement of Permaswap DEX, everFinance seems to be on a spree. In the past days, they had announcements for both Arweave developers and simple community members alike. First, they open-sourced ArSeeding 1.0 – a complex solution for developers that brings some nice tools like packaging data onto chain service, light nodes, Gateway Caching (CDN), and data seeding.

For those of us that are more into art than into coding, they just released a new NFT auction on everPay, this being the ninth one. This auction is quite special when compared to the past ones: the currency of the auction will be a different one than $AR for the first time. This time it will be $CFX (Conflux Network). They are doing this change to mark the integration of Conflux Network with everPay. So, if you like blue furry fellows and the prospects of liquidity mining on Permaswap, just swap some $AR into $CFX on everPay and start bidding here.

Decent Land’s saga continues

Another week, another Decent Land update. Product update number 9 brought, besides others, integration of the ark protocol with Aurora and BSC testnet and support for ERC token-gated guilds in the Ark Protocol Telegram bot. For those who don’t know, Ark Protocol is a way of connecting identities cross-chain developed by the Decent Land team.

Permapages received a new update

Permapages, the way to rapidly bring to life your ArNS page, announced a new update: now they are supporting themes, making it even easier for ArNS holders to create their profile pages. What is ArNS? A friendly way to shorten Arweave transaction IDs to readable names. Basically, with the introduction of themes, Permapages created a friendly way to set up your friendly Arweave name.

everFinance and 4everland started to push Arseeding as a new way to bundle transactions to Arweave

Last week everFinance introduced Arseeding. You can read more about it here. This week 4everland announced that the integrated Arseeding in their “bucket”- 4everland’s own storage service onto Arweave. Now we can all understand better what Arseeding is and what it does. Given the fact that 4everland’s bucket is a AWS3 compatible storage platform, we can expect that more Web2 clients will get the taste of permanent and decentralised storage.

Bundlr launched its testnet

As expected, the launch of Bundlr testnet was received more than well. In less than 24 hours since its release, more than 200 individuals joined to become validators. We don’t know what’s the count right now but we suspect that it’s consistently greater than 200. Given the fact that Bundlr represents the first entry point to Arweave storage for almost everyone, it is important that their network will be as decentralised as possible.

AsteroidDAO is building WeaveDB

On the same page, AsteroidDAO, a decentralised CMS that’s built on top of Arweave, is working to further expand its capabilities by creating a NoSQL database on top of Warp contracts. Their creed is that storage and computation should be separated in order to achieve web-level scalability and with WeaveDB their are aiming to achieve not only this, but hopefully to also ease the transition between Web2 and Web3.

The first decentralised physical museum closed its funding round. Will they use Arweave for their digital files?

As decentralised curatorial initiatives are on the rise, the need for Arweave storage becomes more obvious as Pascal, the cofounder of Akord stressed in the following tweet. The trait of permanence coupled with the proof of not tampering with the archived files makes Arweave the single solution, at least for now, for every entity that has a stake in preserving information. Every physical museum has a digital database of some sort that keeps different types of metadata or even 3D models of their showcased artworks. Where should they keep those databases? The answer is clear for us, will it be clear for them too?

Akord and everPay teamed up for another NFT auction

The tenth auction on everPay is on and features a collaboration between Akord and everPay. The winners of the NFTs will receive a physical high-quality print too. If one tries to sequence the everPay auctions in different epochs, we will get at least three. The one when NFTs were released directly by everPay, the one when the NFTs were signed by different new artists, and now we are in the middle of the era of project collaborations, where every new auction displays the joint work of everPay and another Arweave project. Enjoy the current one where the artist Serge Seidlitz brought to life the crypto slang.

Finally, the Decent Land’s Ark Protocol is out for testing

Ark protocol, the cross-chain identity solution created by Decent.Land is out for everybody to stress till the breaking point. Those who link their identities cross-chain will be whitelisted for future rewards. If you are a project founder and you believe that integrating Ark Protocol inside your dApp will greatly improve your users’ experience, propose an integration and you could win a grant from Decent.Land.

Also, there is a bug bounty for those who will manage to discover bugs in the UI/UX, in the smart contract, or in the node design. So sharpen your perfectionist side and try to break the protocol.

Now you can bulk upload on Permacast

Remember the incentive Permacast offered to upload audio content on it? Now they raised, even more, the rewards for certain uploads, offering 1.5x the normal rewards for those who will upload full audiobooks that are in the public domain. To make this work as smooth as possible, they made the Permacast CLI public. Now everyone can import content in bulk from any existing RSS feed. What are you waiting for? Choose your preferred feed that exists in the public domain realm and start to upload it all.

RedStone introduces NFT price feeds oracles

After the introduction of Warp Contracts, we almost forgot that RedStone Finance is one of the most reliable oracles providers for the Arweave ecosystem. Now they introduced price feeds for the 20 most popular NFT collections from OpenSea. Continuously expanding the data feeds they provide is pivotal for the growth of the ecosystem, in simple terms – new data means new Permaweb dApps

EthSign goes Arweave

EthSign, a Web3 solution for digital signatures and document management, did the right step: they integrated Arweave via everFianace’s Arseeding tool for their current decentralised storage needs. If you want to know more specifics about this integration, you can read our article right here. What is worth to be noted is that with this integration, Arweave is a step closer to a new kind of user that, until now, stayed somehow away from the entire Web3 ecosystem. We are talking about small and medium businesses that are looking for cost-effective and efficient web-based infrastructure. Maybe this is the moment for the entire crypto space to realise that the growth model based on hype should be changed with ones that are more focused on real use-cases.

Ark Protocol, the glue that links all other chains with Arweave

Ark Protocol is one of the many projects Decent Land has been working on for quite some time. Now they introduced a simple yet powerful use case: the capability to link ANS and ENS identities. Now you can stop wondering how to squeeze in your Twitter handle two different names that reflect two separate chains. You can just put one name, and a user can reach both your NFT galleries, those on Arweave, and those on Ethereum. Which name you will choose to showcase depends only on your preferences. Still, keep in mind that ANS names are not subscription based, they are simply forever.

KYVE’s own WARP

Now it’s official – Arweave experiences warp speeds twofold. Once from Warp Contracts created by RedStone and second time through KYVE’s WARP (Well-Architected Retrieval Product). KYVE’s WARP represents a solution for data indexing and access that offers a seamless way to the three features provided by KYVE: fetching, validating, and retrieving data.

August

Olta is in beta testing

Many months ago, we encountered Olta, a collective of true digital creators and tech enthusiasts that wanted to provide an immersive NFT experience ruled by immutable code. Now they announced the launch of their beta version dedicated to digital performance artists. They are using Polygon, Graph Protocol and Arweave in order to offer an unprecedented flexibility in terms of what an artist can actually do through a smart contract, linking data and art and storing it forever. If you are interested in becoming one of the first artists of the new wave of digital art, apply now to become a creator on Olta.

How decent can it get?

As always, another week, another Decent Land update. This week they continued their integration series:

Ark Protocol integrated with Optimism (one of the Layer two solutions promising to unclog Ethereum), broadening the range of crosschain identities linking even more. Also, they integrated ANS (Arweave Name Service) with ViewBlock, Arweave’s explorer. All those little integrations are starting to reveal the bigger picture and it appears that it’s already visible. After the listing of Ark Protocol in dappradar, they already ranked on #25 position in social dApps on launch day.

This is not all, the next week the first Ark NFT called the Cryochambers will be auctioned in the already well known auctions conducted by everPay. If you are curious about what kind of special treats will unlock owning one of those NFTs, go and take a look on our past weekly reports, you may get some hints.

ArDrive aims for the devs

ArDrive updated the capabilities of ArFS (Arweave file system), greatly improving the choices for those power users who want to customise their experience with ArDrive as much as possible. What is ArFS?

ArFS is a data modeling, storage, and retrieval protocol designed to emulate common file system operations and to provide aspects of mutability to your data hierarchy on Arweave‘s otherwise permanent, immutable data storage blockweave.

What can one do with the help of those new features? Well, we recommend to read the following thread and to consult their github in order to grasp the in depth knowledge. If you just want a quick TL;DR, here you have it: your ArDrive uploads can get there at the same time an IPFS CID[…] and this is just one of the potential use-cases.

Sneak peaking into Permaswap

Permaswap is one of the most anticipated projects from the entire ecosystem. Their ambitious white paper combined with the groundbreaking developments they achieved while teaming up with Safeheron in terms of secure and speedy key management, made the project a potential example for the entire crypto space when it come to true DeFi implementations. Now they released a quick preview of the UI Permaswap will be using, but, at the same time, this could be a sign that the grand opening is coming soon.

Six new tools for the Arweave Ecosystem

Arweave Team rarely speaks…but man, when it does it makes the difference. The core team of Arweave developers released not one, not two, but six news tools and protocols that are aiming to bring Arweave at the very front of the blockchain technology – not only when it comes to permanent storage. We’re talking about:

  • the very own Arweave take on curving sybill attacks through Vouch Protocol and Vouch DAO.
  • a total new approach on how people will interact with the web. Instead of letting company algorithms decide what content they should consume, they will be able to create their personal trail for others to follow. This is done through Stamp Protocol and Stamp Coin.
  • programmably exchangeable tokens – thanks to Verto
  • burntAR – a token that will enable deep SmartWeave interactions.

Verto redefines the limits

Programmably Exchangeable Tokens will kill exchanges.

Do you consider this statement too bold? The time will tell. A thing is certain, Verto launched Verto Flex, an open source framework that enables the use of  Programmably Exchangeable Tokens (PETs), one of the core features announced by Arweave team. What does this actually mean? Well, it’s huge, we won’t reiterate their examples, for that, you can just read their thread. To summarise, the issuer of a token can introduce almost any kind of rule that now resides on third parties to be implemented, directly in the code of the token. For example, you don’t have to rely on a launchpad to enforce the rules for early adopters, you can just code those rules directly in the smart contract that is governing your token. Actually, with this implementation, Verto will not only kill the exchanges, but the idea of standards in general. For the first time in crypto, the imagination is the final barrier in the matter of what you can do in regards with a token.

Browsing for some digital art?

Permaswap.network has just released a new update and now supports Arweave Atomic NFTs to be auctioned and acquired directly on their platform. You might have heard stories of people buying NFTs and being greeted by a beautiful 404 error page down the road -this happens because the art is stored on a centralised Web2 platform that removed their NFT or even ceased to exist in the meantime. This is why the Arweave Atomic NFT protocol is the best alternative for NFTs today as it allows all details, including the art, to be stored on the permaweb in a fully secured and decentralised manner. Head on over to Permaswap.network to check out the first featured collection created by the Akord team.

Dip your toes in a data lake this summer season

KYVE Network is an exciting project that is building the data infrastructure of Web3 on the Arweave blockchain. Their technology is used to build Web3 data lakes that can be used to store financial data, network transactions data, block data and even more. This, in turn, allows projects to have better access to the relevant data and increase transparency around on-chain activity. Right now they are looking to crowd-source use-cases for their data lakes that will eventually be built together with the community, so head on over to their Twitter account and take part in building the data highway of Web3.

PermaDAO revealed itself

For almost a month a new project that has the particle “Perma” appeared on Twitter. Who are they and what’s their mission? Well, some questions are still to be answered but one thing is certain: they are aiming to grow the Permaweb by attracting new builders. At least this is the statement of their first disclosed partners, MoleDAO. Given the fact that MoleDAO is a community that aims to connect blockchain talents, with a follower count of over 13k, we recommend taking a look at the future endeavours of PermaDAO – they are definitely on to something.

Another protocol was released for the use of the entire Permaweb

The expected proliferation of new gateways that are being built on top of the Blockweave raised a dilemma: how will they navigate Permaweb dApps and users through the entire plethora of service providers? How will they seamlessly access information stored on various nodes? Now, this dilemma is solved: behold the Permaweb Payment Protocol (P3).

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Basically, if you access the thread below, P3 represents a way that integrates the handling of all the payments necessary to ride the Permaweb into a unitary protocol. What is even better is that P3 was thought to be extensible from the beginning, letting developers inject their own services into the network and making them discoverable for everybody.

Another gateway to Arweave stored content

Talking about gateways, @texturyOrg, relying on the above-mentioned P3 protocol, launched the beta version of a decentralised gateway that serves Arweave, called Arg8. If P3 ensures that everyone can be properly incentivised to run a light gateway, Arg8 is the reason (or at least one of them) for P3 existence. Arg8 represents one of the first implementations that are set to create a fully decentralised environment around Arweave. Now, even if the Arweave storage is fully decentralised, the way to retrieve the information is concentrated in a single gateway – arweave.net, held by Arweave’s core team. With Arg8 everybody can offer gateway services by setting a node locally or on other storage service and start getting paid for it.

Evermore has a new home

One of the first projects that offered a way to conveniently store data on Arweave, through both a web app and a desktop app, moved to a new address: evermore.network. We’re glad to see how OGs are continuing to carry on no matter what. An example of endurance against the adversities thrown at you. A metaphor for both Arweave and the early builders that ventured on the uncharted seas of Permaweb.

September

Arweave in Asia, the hottest event of this autumn

Arweave’s Asian based community is bigger than ever. Considering this, a meeting of Asian-based projects with the core team of Arweave was inevitable. In the second half of September, Singapore will be the spot with the highest concentration of arweavers. Besides some European-based projects like Verto Exchange, Akord Team, Decent.Land and RedStone, even Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave is expected to arrive and exchange thoughts about the present and the future of the Permaweb and the Blockweave. Also, this will represent a very first for us, the Arweave News team. We’ll be present there and we’ll broadcast exclusive news to you throughout the entire duration of the meeting. We’re so eager to finally meet our friends from Asia. If you are a part of a project that’s building on top of Arweave and you want to be a part of this meeting, just reach out to everFinance, the initiators of this event.

ArDrive goes mobile?!

ArDrive, one of Arweave’s powerhouses when it comes to offering easy-to-access Arweave storage, is preparing something big, apparently: an ArDrive mobile dApp. Until now, Arweave native mobile dApps stage is almost nonexistent, with the most known Arweave-based wallet – ArConnect, being available for now only as a browser extension. As you may already know, the entire Web3 mobile section is still incipient, with a user experience that’s way behind the one you encounter on desktops. This will change over time, and ArDrive already signals that they are in the avant-garde of this change.

RedStone just closed its seed round

RedStone concluded en fanfare the week. Not only did they present their tech at ETHWarsaw, but they closed their seeding round by raising 7 million $. If you want to know more about this news you can check our dedicated article here. This entry is not trying to reiterate the info that you can already find in our article; it is meant only to evidentiate a single thing:

Remember the Web2 startups from the last decade? How they were obtaining millions with an MVP (minimal viable product) that was more a sketch than an actual product? RedStone’s seeding round represents the opposite. Yeah, an Arweave native Web3 project looks more serious than cohorts of Web2 startups. They have worked on improving their products for the last two years, constantly pushing tech for an entire ecosystem, never trying to milk the hype. Only after they were an established brand did they do their seeding round. Food for thought for any naysayer that shoots statements about Web3 based only on the rotten apples.

Apex Foundation announced a new storage platform that leverages Arweave

Apex foundation just announced ApexCloud. A storage platform built on top of Arweave. While we are not exactly certain that they are the very first decentralised solution with a Fiat on-ramp solution for Arweave storage (from what we know, Akord already offers a Fiat payment solution for Arweave storage), they are certainly among few that are providing this kind of payment and there is definitely a need for more Fiat on-ramp solutions. May the weave forever grow.

https://twitter.com/apexswap/status/1565071507554009089?s=20&t=OPe3DOqOygzkOf1U1pcp-g

Warp Contracts just announced Q-Rate

What is Q-Rate? It represents Warp Contracts’s take on truth proof systems. While the huge rise of fake news represented one of the reasons Arweave was invented – as a way to fight for the truth – now, on top of Arweave, Warp Contracts and other players like PermaFact, are trying to take the fight against fake information even further.

Verto did it again. Big time

Probably you know them as Verto.exchange, the first Arweave-based marketplace – the true OGs. Probably you know Tate, their founder. Did you know that he is only 18? This detail doesn’t represent an obstacle, on the contrary in his case, apparently, it fueled the capacity to think big, and to aim only for what is the very best when it comes to what can be done on Arweave. Now his company, Community Labs, also has the means to realise his vision: 30 million $ raised to boost Arweave adoption. Great days are laying ahead.

Pianity released a hot new feature

Pianity, one of the most relevant music NFT marketplaces that is using Arweave since its inception, announced the release of a new feature: the Stats Page. It improves the overall user experience, letting you have a peek at different metrics like the last purchase price, the floor price, and the number of owners relative to the number of editions for each song or artist. While the technology behind a Web3 project is vital, it is still important to constantly try to offer a user experience as smooth as possible. Pianity does exactly that.

4EVERLAND now offers even more ways to interact with Arweave

4EVERLAND announced the offering of AR hosting. They took everFinance’s Arseeding and integrated it into their product to offer a smooth experience for Web2 and Web3 developers alike. If you want to know more about it, you can check our article below, or, if you truly want to know more, you can wait until we publish an exclusive interview with 4EVERALAND’s founder. For now, you can enjoy a little sneak peek:

We are very excited about our integration with Arweave and the implementation of the Ar-hosting service, which will mean that developers can quickly deploy and host their front-ends on Arweave through 4EVERLAND. By providing such a CI/CD tool, we can make front-end deployment easier, more efficient and less costly for devs. Also this integration provides devs who previously hosted their front-ends on IPFS or  Dfinity via our Hosting service, a new option.

Decent Land’s frenzy week

Usually, when an Arweave project makes an announcement about new developments, it gives us at least a week to digest the news before a new update. That’s definitely not the case with Decent Land. First, they announced the launch of a hackathon that aims to push the exploration further for what can be done with Ark protocol, ANS (Arweave Name Service), and ar.page. All three tools are developed by Decent Land as prerequisites to fulfill their grand vision.

Talking about Decent Land’s grand vision, here you have a taste of it. Their first official road map was just published, and believe us, it is not the usual road map you’ll find while scrolling through other Web3 projects. Here you will find the underlying details of what can be the software infrastructure for a myriad of Web3 social platforms. From a cross-chain identity layer to tools that will handle complex online societies – all are there. Much of the protocols and tools described in their roadmap are already being tested, so expect rather sooner than later for the new generation of truly decentralised social networks to arrive.

WeaveDB meets ArConnect

Some weeks ago, we covered in one of our Weekly Reports the appearance of WeaveDB. A product of AsteroidDAO, that’s basically a NoSQL database on top of Warp contracts. Now they integrated ArConnect with WeaveDB and showcased the general use of WeaveDB with a simple cross-chain demo dApp – The Wall v2, where you can authenticate with Metamask in the case of EVM chains, with Internet Computer wallet, or, evidently, with Arweave’s ArConnect.

Arweave 2.6

One major highlight from the conference in Singapore was the announcement by Williams of an upgrade to the chain called Arweave 2.6. The upgrade took 18 months to research and develop and it would require less energy to save more data. Check out this story by Arweave News’s AZ where Arweave 2.6 was explained for both developers and non-developers.

The Digital History Association or DHA, a Swiss non-profit organisation, was also launched by Williams in Singapore. The DHA would provide research and development service to the protocol and would promote mass adoption of Arweave. In this story, Arweave News reported in detail what the DHA is and how it will be operated.

EverFinance changes name

If you are wondering what the saying ‘what is in a name’ means, then in EverVision, EverFinance’s new name, you will find the meaning. During the week, it successfully co-hosted Arweave in Asia conference. EverFinance announced on Twitter that it was changing its name to reflect what it currently is: an Arweave infrastructure builder.

 

EverVision will be operating the newly-announced Arweave Asia Fund. The fund will help to build and encourage the adoption of the Arweave ecosystem across south-east Asia.

Sneak preview of Permapages dashboard

Ahead of its unveiling next week, Permapages, a site generator, note taker and blogging platform with built-in support for Stamp Protocol, showed users changes made to its stamps dashboard. The number of Atomic Assets in the system and stamps can be viewed on the new dashboard. Users can also connect wallets and view stats.

Decent.land integrates with Lens Protocol

Powered by Ark verifiable identity attestations, the integration allows decent.land oracle and API to display Lens handles and activity for Arweave users, making it possible for dApps that use Arweave identity to verify and import everything from Lens.

October

ArDrive goes mobile

“Big” is an understatement when trying to describe this piece of news. We have to admit it: nowadays, web interactions are mostly mobile. Web3 is still entrenched in classical browser-based interactions, and that hurts the user experience. I personally experienced the lack of mobile integrations with Arweave while I was at Arweave in Asia event.

If it weren’t for @permapages, who graciously stepped in and uploaded it, probably by the time I got to my laptop, I would have been too tired to do it. ArDrive just released this potential frustration from the shoulders of arweavers (or, for now, at least from the shoulders of arweavers that are Android users). ArDrive Mobile dApp, the first of its kind, lets everyone save everything into permanence with only a finger tap because, yeap, it has biometric login for a smooth experience.

Forward Research kick-off symposium

A lot of this week’s news is still in direct relation to the event that happened in Singapore. The number and the importance of announcements made on that day were huge. As Sam said, it represented the culmination of almost one and a half years of work. Fully understanding their implication will take weeks, even months, of further unveiling one by one. One of those directions is Forward Research. Remember Open Web Foundry? We wrote quite extensively about them. Imagine an even better organisation for incubating Arweave native projects than OWF. That’s Forward Research, the evolution of OWF. First announced at Arweave in Asia event, now they fully revealed themselves through an online symposium.

The beta iteration of EXM is now out in the wild

Not so long ago, we had an interview with Andres Pirela where we talked beside others about his Execution Machine. Back then, a developer had to ask for access to test the implementation. Now EXM beta is totally open for everyone who wants to test it. Execution Machine is one of the first projects built under the new development paradigm on Arweave revealed by Tate Tanenbraun at the Arweave in Asia event. Through Community Labs, projects that will deliver developer tooling that will abstract the usual Web3 clunky interactions will gradually appear and will represent the glue between the protocol and new generations of dApp developers. So yeah, cheers to EXM, being the first from a bunch that will literally help history to be written.

Akord – New Protocol, new app

One of the announcements from – you guessed it – Arweave in Asia, was made by Akord – they open-sourced their entire protocol. Now their vaults can be integrated by different dApps and become actual containers of data that can be moved from dApp to dApp. All this without losing the ownership of the data that’s inside the vault. Now they doubled down and presented the new version of the Akord App. The user experience does not differ much, but be assured, there’s a brand-new roaring engine under the hood.

Arweave News is launching Arweave News Specials

Yeap, it’s that moment when we slip news about ourselves. Our presence at Arweave in Asia helped us to conduct a series of exclusive interviews with project founders. Rough, almost unedited materials that represent the thoughts of individuals that are building on Arweave and, in the process, are building the future of Arweave and of the Web itself. While we still figure out the definitive content delivery format, a thing is certain: this is only the beginning of Arweave News Specials series, and you have to expect 1 to 1 physical interviews more often.

Below is just a part of those who joined us in the first round of interviews. Can you guess who those four founders are? But what about the ones yet to be revealed?

Akord brings Web3 Digital Signatures to their vaults

The vault technology perfected by Akord will probably play an increasingly important role in the Web of Value economy. On top of that, Akord is constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be done on Arweave by integrating more and more real-world use cases. This week they implemented Digital Signatures. One can send a PDF to Akord and sign it with @Dedoco_official’s solution. One more step into transforming Arweave into a friendly permanent storage alternative for companies all over the world. The extra perk that a company will gain, besides their normal interaction with their flow of documents, is that they will become the true custodians of their documents, in a secure manner, without the need to own actual hardware for storage.

Another integration for Bundlr

Bundlr did it again. Another fast Layer 1 chain partnered with Bundlr to use Arweave storage for the metadata from Aptos protocol dApps. Given the fact that both us and Bundlr are biased when it comes to the benefits of using Arweave via Bundlr… let’s allow one member from the Aptos team – @moshaikhs tell you why they need Bundlr:

Projects within the Aptos ecosystem require the ability to store and process large amounts of data in real time. Bundlr solves for this need by providing the ease-of-use and flexibility that our developer community requires to build successfully in the long-term.

Warp Contracts conquers ERC-20 standard

Warp Contracts, the entity responsible for offering the underlying technology for smart contract interactions for a lot of Arweave-based projects, brings to our attention the Warp ERC-20 token standard. Basically, the Warp SDK allows anybody to create via Rust ERC-20 compatible tokens on Arweave. As they highlighted in the below thread, the sole apparition of ERC-20 standard inside Arweave could fuel a new age of increased liquidity and capital inflow, given the fact that both CEXs and developers are quite accustomed to this fungible token standard.

Somehow we are presented with two options:

  • Option A – Let’s stay and see if this will happen
  • Option B – Let’s start and build using Earp ERC-20 and see what will happen

Arweave in Lisbon

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Almost a week left until Arweave in Lisbon event. Arweave’s core team and a bunch of projects from the ecosystem will be present there – what about you? Arweave’s presence in Lisbon is structured in three main events:

On 29 October, there will be the devDAO x Arweave Ecosystem Happy Hour – registration here.

On 31 October, the grand gala, the thing itself – Arweave in Lisbon Demo Day, an entire day that will feature Arweave projects like Bundlr, Akord, RedStone, EverVision, Kyve, MetaWeave, and Decent.land – registration here.

On 5 November, An evening of Decentralised Infrastructure featuring Kyve, Bundlr, and Akord – registration here.

Of course, Arweave News will be there to cover all the week’s highlights. The only question remains if we’ll meet you there as well. Remember, if you are a project that wants to build on Arweave, we’ll be more than happy to hear your story and have you for an interview.

ArDrive Team rebrands in AR.IO Team

From the beginning of the current year, it was apparent to the entire community that ArDrive team somehow outgrew ArDrive dApp. They branched into multiple protocols and dApps, so they decided to get things straight: ArDrive Team becomes AR.IO, while ArDrive becomes the flagship dApp under a much broader umbrella. Go and check our dedicated article for more about this rebrand.

Akord enables large file uploads

Sometimes the size counts, and Akord acknowledged that by allowing uploads on Arweave up to 30GB.

The Arweave network itself only enforces a 2^256 byte TX size limit, but the apps on top sometimes enforce lower limits for reasons of practicality. Great to see these being lifted!

No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t have described this news better than Sam did.

Permaswap testnet is live

The long-awaited Arweave-based DEX is almost ready for business. Permaswap testnet is finally live. We know that EverVision’s community was more than eager to see it running, so now it’s the moment for everyone to get involved and test it to the breaking point. The more the testnet will be stressed, the better because now is the moment to catch all the potential bugs or glitches in order to have a flawless experience when the mainnet goes live. Also, there are incentives for those who help the Permaswap team in conducting a rigorous test set.

Arweave just got its own state-of-the-art message board

Happy news Arweavers, the team over at Community Labs has finished building the first HackerNews-inspired message board for our ecosystem. The team has built the entire logic using the Execution Machine, and it all lives in a serverless and trustless environment on the permaweb. Be one of the first to share your thoughts with the Arweave community by heading over to news.communitylabs.com today.

P.S. Signing up is a breeze, just ArConnect and pick a username.

Can we interest you in some $bAR?

If you weren’t convinced yet, ArDrive is now giving you one more reason for using them to store your files on the permaweb securely. For every upload through their web and mobile applications, you’ll now be minting fresh $bAR. Support for $bAR in the ArDrive CLI is also under development and will be released by the team in the near future. Check out their newly updated app at ardrive.io and listen to your wallet go bARRRR for every new upload.

Discover Web3’s first permissionless SQL database

Have you ever stopped and wondered what Web3 databases of the future would look like? Wonder no more, as Kwil has already built a decentralised permissionless SQL database on the permaweb. Check out why their product is key for Web3’s infrastructure layer and learn more about the project by watching their interview with SevenX Ventures.

November

Arweave Network meets Meta

That’s all for this month, folks!

Well, of course, it is not. Yeap, the Meta/Instagram announcement is huge, and it will have a lot of repercussions when it comes to Arweave broader adoption and the – let’s call it normalization of the permanent storage in the mainstream web narrative, but this is just the first leg of a road that just opened in the front of the protocol. By reaching this level – adoption by one of the largest content-driven platforms in the world, Arweave only achieved in the public eye, what we already knew for some time now: the acknowledgment that it is a mature protocol, ready to be mass-implemented.

The above-mentioned idea – the maturity of the protocol is backed by actual hard data. In the same week, Arweave already crossed the threshold of 400 million pieces of data stored on the network. If it’s not impressive, try to count to 1000.

Also, October, basically, prior to any mind blowing announcement, represented the month with the most data uploads from Arweave’s history.

Arweave in Lisbon aftermath

Having Bundlr as the main organiser and Amelia, the COO of Bundlr as the host of Arweave Demo Day, October 31th was deemed to be remembered.

The day was opened by Sam Williams with a new take on an already brand new subject: he presented the concept of evolutionary Apps, as a direct implementation of the Fair Forks he and Abhav had just theorised some weeks ago. The idea is that via forking the competitive cycles between dev teams could be reduced and even replaced by a new kind of relationship between opposing teams with similar goals. In Web2, when two teams are competing for a niche, there will be only one winner. With the help of evolutionary apps both teams could strike some wins, letting both survive and even strive, with the actual winner being the end user that will have to choose between the work of two teams instead of one. Did we catch your interest? Good, because we’ll talk more about this in the future.

Also, 9 projects from the Arweave ecosystem presented their latest developments, so yeah…there is a 4 hour long recording, but it’s worth the time, so take your notebook and enjoy!

Execution Machine partnered with decent.land

Execution Machine, the project that brings a totally different approach to the industry with its trustless functions approach, just partnered with decent.land for nothing less than trying to push the Arweave ecosystem to “exceed any standard”. That can be considered a bold statement if you don’t know both teams, but we are pretty sure that they can actually make it a reality. Just a couple of days ago, EXM released version 0.1.5, which greatly expanded the already hefty set of features they amassed under EXM’s belt.

Permacast has been rewritten

Arguably user experience is the next leg up in the Web3 space. We figured out how to create decentralised Apps, now we have to make them available to the general public. Permacast is doing exactly that by rewriting the entire code in EXM, leveraging instant transaction finality for the end user, and increasing the ways a user can interact with the dApp by allowing payments in other tokens besides AR$ thanks to Bundlr.

Swap like crazy on Permaswap’s second testnet

After their first successful testnet that gathered over 4500 users, Permaswap, Arweave’s first cross-chain DEX, has just launched their second testnet. This time around, they want to stress-test their infrastructure and are running a “Limitless Stress Test” until the 17th of November.

If you want to help the team over at Permaswap, you just need to request testnet tokens using the provided form and start swapping and providing liquidity like crazy. Of course, the team thought of making the process more engaging for their users, so they are offering 100 AR in rewards for the users that have the highest swap and liquidity volumes.

Uploads on the permaweb have gotten easier on Akord

This week Akord launched another update to their v2 platform by introducing the ability to upload folders directly through your browser. This will allow users to maintain all their files in the folder structure they are used to while still enjoying the comfort of knowing their files are secure on the permaweb. As this wasn’t enough, the team also did some under-the-hood improvements to the Akord API, which means new vault creations now happen 70-75% quicker. Adding notes and folders, as well as renaming, are 60-80% quicker. Test out their latest improvements by heading over to their platform.

WeaveDB and EXM are partnering up

The teams at WeaveDB and EXM announced a new partnership this week with the goal of developing a NoSQL database on the permaweb. It seems the teams have been working on integrations between for a while now, and are getting closer to offering developers a reliable and flexible Web3 NoSQL alternative. If you’d like to learn more about their plans and future developments, make sure to follow them on Twitter.

Warp Contracts is getting a new testnet

As activity has been steadily ramping up on the Warp Testnet, the team over at Redstone has been developing a new testnet solution in order to overcome the scalability limitations that the first iteration encountered. The new testnet is no longer based on Arlocal (the standard local testnet for Arweave) and instead all transactions will be posted on the mainnet with a special tag so these can be easily identified and accessed through the AR and Warp gateways. Rest assured, all existing tools will still be supported on the new testnet so users will be able to enjoy all the benefits of the upgrade. Make sure to switch on over to the new testnet quickly as the team has disclosed that the old one will be shut down soon.

Check out Permacast’s shiny new landing page

Permacast, the Web3 podcasting platform built on top of Arweave has had a few interesting announcements this week. The team announced that the application has been rewritten in EXM and is now also leveraging Bundlr to bring users instant transaction finality and the ability to pay with ETH. On top of that, the team also launched a new landing page for the platform to assist new users. To find out more about the platform and its plans for shaping the future of podcasting, head on over to https://permacast.dev.

Alex. As in Alexandria. The library of Alexandria

If one has paid attention to the last public appearances of Sam Williams, then Alex. is no news for them. For some time now, Arweavers have tried to find a sustainable way to create public archives of meaningful data sets by extracting the value of those data sets. Alex. is the answer:

Alex. is a decentralised archival platform that leverages the immutable and permanent data storage of Arweave and includes a mechanism that encourages end user participation.Users contribute to collections and they receive “artifacts” back into their wallets as they are minted. Artifacts are NFTs of items the collection is storing. Since the artifacts are stored on Arweave, they cannot be changed or removed in any way by anyone.This is the continuation of the dream that was the Great Library of Alexandria. In order for us to move forward and continue making better decisions we need the ability to clearly see our past.

everPay is bringing Web2 financial institutions to the permaweb

We’re excited to share that this week the everVision team announced an important milestone for Arweave and the Web3 overall. Through the launch of their strategic partnership with Malaysia’s Asia Digital Bank, they will leverage the everPay protocol and provide the necessary tools for Asia Digital Bank to store the ledger of financial institutions to the permaweb. This development begins a new and exciting chapter for our ecosystem, one in which Arweave can become the underlying settlement infrastructure for the financial institutions of the future.

The two teams have ambitious plans and are looking to develop more Web3 technology projects aimed at serving the needs of financial institutions, so make sure to read all the details of their announcement and find out everything about the exciting things to come.

Ar:// is taking over browsers everywhere

A new update released by the team over at ArConnect introduced support of the ar:// protocol for all compatible browsers. What this means for users is that accessing data stored on Arweave is now much easier, all you need to do is input the right address in your web browser. The implementation of the Arweave URI scheme supports both transactions and ARNS names so you should have everything you need right at your fingertips. Check out their announcement to learn more about these exciting changes.

The permaweb just got its own WeTransfer

Permafy, a new project that aims to simplify the upload of data on the permaweb, has just launched this past week in collaboration with Arweave’s own Community Labs! Permafy plans to introduce the permaweb to the world by removing all barriers to entry for crypto and non-crypto users. The uploads can be done through any browser, a wallet is not required for authentication and payments can be made through credit card using fiat.

So, what’s left? Quick uploads and a shareable link to your file, which is now permanently and securely stored across the Arweave blockchain. You no longer have any excuses for using centralised and intrusive services when sharing your data, so head on over to their website and take advantage of their introductory pricing (50¢ for 100MB).

Bundlr is bringing xNFTs to Arweave

As we’ve already gotten accustomed to the team at Bundlr, this week they announced a new partnership with Backpack, the project working on the next-gen wallet for xNFTs. Through their collaboration, the teams have managed to bring xNFTs into the Arweave ecosystem, enabling users to store their xNFTs securely on the permaweb.

What are xNFTs you might wonder? The team over at Backpack claims these are the next iteration on the classical NFT, with the “x” standing in for executable. This means that the holders of xNFTs have the right to execute the tokenised code these contain. In other words, xNFTs can store applications that can only be accessed by the rightful owner of the token, opening up a new universe of use-cases for smart contracts and Dapps. Learn more about xNFTs and how these work by heading over to the official announcement from Bundlr.

Welcome to the real-time permaweb!

This week we found out that Warp Contracts is bringing subscriptions to Arweave, but rest assured, it’s the good kind of subscription. The team has released the “Warp Subscription Plugin” which allows developers to subscribe to a contract and get real-time state updates whenever a new interaction occurs. This new feature will eliminate the need for Dapps to continuously check for contract changes every few seconds and will allow updates to be reflected in real-time. The feature is currently in beta, but it is already poised to bring great benefits to the ecosystem. Check out more about how the new feature works and take it for a spin by heading over to their Github page.

decent.land can’t stop building

The team over at decent.land finished last week with the announcement that v2 of their Ark Protocol is officially live! The Ark Protocol is a “multi-chain identity linking protocol” that allows Arweave addresses to be associated with addresses on other chains, in essence providing users with one identity across the entire Web3. For v2, Ark has been rewritten in EXM which brings improvement to the speed and scalability of the protocol while also providing lower fees. Users of v1 need to re-link at https://ark.decent.land/migrate as the signing protocol model has been changed, but the good news is that users of Ark v1 are eligible for an early-adopter POAP.

As if releasing an overhauled version of their main protocol wasn’t enough, the team also wanted to help others in the ecosystem and launched molecule.sh, a new library aimed at helping EXM smart contract developers. Throughout the development process for Ark v2, the team found itself constantly reusing functions with common use cases and believed that these should be better abstracted in a standard library, hence the inception of molecule.sh. The team has plans to further develop the library as they encounter more common use cases for EXM, so be sure to keep your eye on them.

December

Alex. is immortalising China’s Zero-COVID policy

As we’ve presented in one of our previous weekly reports, the Permaweb is already being used to preserve the facts of the world’s most important events through Alex., the decentralised archival platform. Even though the project launched just a few weeks ago, multiple archiving pools have already been created, covering topics such as the US mid-term elections and the crypto “crunch” of 2022. This week, the protocol has launched yet another important pool covering the events surrounding China’s Zero-COVID policy. This will help preserve the facts surrounding the current China situation and will ensure our history is censorship-free. Head on over to Alex. to play your part in safeguarding our history and contribute to the archiving pool.

ArConnect 1.0 is on the horizon

The team at ArConnect announced this week the start of the Closed Beta for ArConnect 1.0, the complete overhaul of the ArConnect experience. The updated version has been completely refactored and besides the new user experience, it also includes a host of new features such as internalisation, devtools for Arweave dApps and an explore section where users can learn more about existing projects in the Arweave ecosystem directly from us – Arweave News. Even though access to the beta is currently restricted to selected users, everyone can learn more about what the team has developed by watching their Arweave Lisbon presentation. To find out when the Open Beta launches and be one of the first to sign up, make sure to follow them on Twitter!

PermaDAO and ArWiki – a match made in heaven

This week we learned about the new cooperative partnership between PermaDAO and ArWiki, two leading initiatives in the Arweave ecosystem that are focused on providing information and education to all of the ecosystem members. The goal of this newly formed partnership is to further support the process of ArWiki’s content localisation to Chines – a process that has already been started by PermaDAO. Check out more about this exciting new partnership and learn how you can contribute to these initiatives!

Did anyone say lightning fast? It must have been Bundlr…

When we think about the “Bear” market, the things that first come to everyone’s mind are decreasing values, losses, and a general sense of uncertainty. Short-term, these are the most impactful, but we believe the biggest risk of them all has good projects that stop building. Luckily, the projects in the Arweave ecosystem have proven quite the opposite in the last few months and the latest example is Bundlr, who announced an update to their network this week. With this new update, Bundlr Network is now 60% faster, allowing users to upload data within 20ms. If that’s not lightning fast, we don’t know what is. Don’t waste any time and check out the new improvements by heading over to bundlr.network.

Have you joined the hottest Anti-Party of the year?

On the 30th of November, Forward Research hosted the Anti-Party 2, their yearly event focused on bringing together builders from all around the ecosystem in order to further advance Arweave’s development. This year, before a quick brief of the latest advancements on Arweave held by no other than Arweave’s founder – Sam Williams, we witnessed the official introduction of Alex., and the presentation of the hottest new developments from STAMPS and PermaFacts.

While we covered Alex. in a distinct entry above, let us dive into what Tom from STAMPS and JShaw from PermaFacts presented because it was quite a feast:

Tom introduced  rewards for distributors – a way to allow dApps that implement STAMPS to retain a portion of the reward generated by a STAMP that was conducted on that particular dApp and Super STAMPs:

https://permawebnews.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/super-stamp.png"

JShaw used the Anti-Party as a way to simultaneously showcase how Permafacts works and to present the truth challenge – a competition dedicated to journalists – winkwink. Guess what, we have some assertions kept for this challenge, do you have some as well?

If you weren’t able to join, follow Forward Research on Twitter and find out when the recording is made available.

decent.land – the place that never stops growing

We’re beginning to think decent.land’s team does not sleep, considering the recent flurry of releases in the past few weeks. In our last weekly report, we highlighted the release of their updated protocol Ark v2 which was fully refactored using EXM, and their launch of new developer tooling, molecule.sh. This week we’re here to tell you that in the meantime molecule.sh has already received an update, introducing new features such as lucky-draw, address-to-owner and base functions allowing Arweave contract interactions to be signed by Ethereum wallets.

If this wasn’t enough, they’ve also launched full compatibility between the Ark and NEAR protocols, supporting connections between Arweave, NEAR and EVM (0x) addresses. This means that your Ark ID can contain references to the three types of chains that were previously non-interoperable. Go link your NEAR identity today by heading over to Ark Protocol and make sure to read all the other NFT-related updates from decent.land in their announcement.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Permaswap is ready to RUMBLEEE!

You might remember just a few weeks ago that the team at Permaswap concluded their second testnet. Right on the heels of that success, the team announced the launch of their mainnet, albeit in the BETA phase for now. This marks a crucial milestone for the Arweave ecosystem, with the launch of our very first cross-chain DEX!

The team has announced a limited number of trading pairs that are available from the start but have promised that PSTs will start being listed throughout the BETA phase. Access Permaswap to make your first trade and if you’re interested in becoming a liquidity provider for the DEX, the team has created a simple process to become whitelisted, which can be accessed here.

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.

Do you feel a sudden urge to comment?

You might already be using ECHO to like your favorite Web3 content, but the team wasn’t content with only that. They’ve now released the ECHO extension in order to allow you to comment on NFTs and articles hosted on OpenSea, LooksRare, viamirror and others. If you’re wondering, all comments are free and permanently stored on Arweave, so don’t worry – you’ll always be remembered of your bad taste in digital art. If you’re more of a social media person, the team has teased that comment support for Twitter might be coming soon, so stay tuned and install the ECHO extension to start commenting!

 

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Pierre

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

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