Arweave Review

I've been thinking for a while which project should have the "honor" of being on my first ever review here but in the end I decided to opt for one, whose public sale (now re-branded, due to a huge demand, into the "proof of interest") is literally going to start any time soon and whose mainnet is just one week away from launch.

So, this one is going to be about Arweave, "a new data storage protocol on a blockchain-like structure called the blockweave" as they describe it themselves.

As you might know, if you ever bothered to read my introduction post, I am not a tech person (I am very fond of emerging technologies, but I'm rather like a baby getting excited about seeing a new toy), so I will keep this one short and simple hoping that my graphomaniac exercise will resonate with like-minded people.

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The Idea

The idea is not new: to create a storage on blockchain (this can be expanded to data sharing, data collaboration, and data and identity protection). This is already being implemented by Filecoin, Siacoin and Storj and some others. The difference of Arweave is that they promise to do it much much cheaper than the abovementioned competitors owing to their unique approach.

The Technology

So, the unique technology behind Arweave is called Blockweave. The main feature of it is the Proof of Access mechanism. Its novelty lies in the idea that Blockweave's consensus mechanism doesn't require miners to use a lot of hashing power (i.e. electricity). Instead, miners try to create as many replications of data in the system as possible. Therefore, the more replicated data there is in the Blockweave, the less power is required for mining and the cheaper the storage becomes.

Another advantage of Arweave is that there is no need in full nodes to store the entire data on the Blockweave. Because each block on it contains all block hashes and active wallets. This means that new miners joining the network only need to download the latest block to retrieve all the necessary data.

Arweave uses Wildfire (network topology system) to incentivize miners to share data as soon as possible. As the team explains: "Wildfire can be summarised as: ‘if you share with me, I will share with you’".

Last but not least: when solving a block, miners don’t distribute it in its entirety but "blockshadow" it, sending just a couple of kilobytes of data to the peers who can then recreate the block from scratch. This very function can help Arweave reach the promised 5000 tp/s.

The Team

Most of the team members have affiliation with the University of Kent. The executives look young, with CEO Sam Williams and CTO William Jones coming from academia (both hold PhDs in Computer Science with honors) and having only one year of corporate experience. The development side looks stronger. Kyle Beckles spent more than three years with private companies as a developer, while Matt Lockyer has 9 months of experience as Head of Blockchain Solutions at Vanbex Group. Meanwhile, advisor side looks stronger with expertise in corporate funding, business development, blockchain, marketing and software development. Considering huge interest to the project from private investors, one can assume that despite the absence of "all-star" team members, Arweave is able to deliver, probably to the highest standard.

The Finance

The total hardcap for the entire tokensale is 8.6m USD. Most of the amount has already been collected through private sale and community sale for early supporters. But unlike many other projects and despite such a low harcap, the Arweave team decided to allocate another 675,000 USD for those who have discovered the project recently. Kudoz for being the true proponents of the decentralization, guys!

From the future growth perspective, in my opinion, Arweave has very good prospects. Filecoin has a market cap of abount 1bn USD, Sia – 500m USD and Storj – 125m USD. Therefore, 10-15x in six months doesn't look unrealistic at all. Though, I am not a financial adviser, and anything can happen in crypto so don't forget to do your own research.

More info about the project:
Arweave website: http://www.arweave.org/
Arweave Telegram: https://t.me/arweave
Arweave Blog https://medium.com/@arweave
Arweave Lightpaper https://arweave.org/files/arweave-lightpaper.pdf

Thanks for reading and feel free to upvote, resteem and follow me!