Arweave (AR)

Arweave (AR) is a decentralized storage network designed to store data permanently in return for a single upfront payment. Users pay in AR, the network's native token, and the protocol places most of the fee in an endowment that is meant to fund storage for centuries. The project calls the collection of websites, applications and files stored on it the "permaweb".

Arweave competes with and complements other decentralized storage systems such as Filecoin, which sells storage under time-limited contracts, and the InterPlanetary File System, which addresses content but does not itself guarantee that anyone keeps it. It also offers an alternative to centralised cloud storage such as Amazon S3. Its design aims at immutability: once data is stored and confirmed, it is meant to be impossible to change or delete.

Most storage is like renting a locker: pay every month, and if you stop paying, your things are thrown away. Arweave is more like paying once for a locker that is meant to stay locked forever. The fee goes into a shared savings pot, and the interest-like growth of that pot is used to pay the people who keep the lockers running, year after year.

The bet behind the system is that storing data gets cheaper over time, as it has for decades. If that continues, a single fee paid today can cover the cost of storage long into the future.

Arweave was founded by Sam Williams and William Jones and began in 2017 under the name Archain. Its mainnet launched in June 2018. The project raised funds through token sales and venture investment, and later upgrades changed its mining and storage design. In 2024 the team introduced AO, a computing system built on top of Arweave that runs many processes in parallel and stores their messages on the network; it moved from testnet to mainnet in February 2025.

• Blockweave. Each new block links to the previous block and to a randomly chosen earlier block, so miners must hold historical data to produce new blocks.
• Proof of access. Arweave uses a form of proof of work combined with proof that a miner can retrieve stored data. Later versions, such as Succinct Proofs of Random Access, reward miners that store more of the dataset and can read it quickly.
• Endowment. Most of each storage fee goes into a storage endowment; the protocol releases funds to miners if block rewards and fees are not enough to cover storage costs.
• Bundling. Services bundle many small uploads into one Arweave transaction, which lowers costs and speeds confirmation.

AR is used to pay for storage and to reward miners. The protocol fixed a maximum supply of 66 million AR, of which 55 million were created at launch and the rest released over time as mining rewards. AR trades on major cryptocurrency exchanges. Because fees are paid in AR but storage costs are incurred in fiat terms, the endowment's real value depends on the token's market price as well as on storage cost trends.

Arweave stores files for many NFT collections, so the images and metadata a token points to cannot be swapped or removed. Other uses include archives of websites and news articles, decentralized application front ends that cannot be taken down by a single host, scientific and public-interest data, and records from other blockchains. Developers access it through gateways that serve stored data over normal web addresses.

Arweave's permanence depends on economic assumptions. If storage costs stop falling or the AR price falls sharply for a long time, the endowment may not cover costs as planned, although the protocol has mechanisms to adjust. Permanent, uncensorable storage also raises legal and ethical problems: illegal or harmful material uploaded once cannot easily be removed, and gateway operators may filter content, which means access is less absolute than storage. Data privacy laws that give people a right to have information deleted sit uneasily with immutable storage. As with other crypto assets, AR's price has shown high volatility, and the network's long-term success depends on continued demand for permanent storage.

• Arweave