Arweave, permaweb, permanent storage, NFTs, IPFS, decentralized, web3

Please Read! This article does not provide financial advice and is purely for education purposes.

The most common form of decentralized storage on the blockchain today is IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). IPFS is a peer-to-peer network of nodes or computers that lends storage space to people. Typically metadata is stored on IPFS by paying a node to temporarily store that information via the filecoin blockchain.

Side Note: If you want to know why decentralized storage is necessary read this article on the Centralized NFL Metadata.

However, this system comes with a downside. Data stored on IPFS is not permanent because you are paying someone else to store that information. When you stop paying a computer to store that data, it is gone.

So twenty years from now, that ape Snoop Dog bought might be worthless because a computer stopped getting paid to store that data. Hence, the image and all of the attributes of the ape is lost.

What is Arweave?

Arweave is another decentralized storage system that claims to have systems that creates permanent storage and ownership.

How Does Arweave Incentives Long Term Data Storage?

The Arweave Protocol and Blockchain incentives permanent ownership of its data by its consensus mechanism called Succinct Proofs of Random Access. The method is easily explained by its name. To mine a new block on Arweave, a miner needs to prove it has access to the data on a random block on the Arweave chain. This both incentivizes miners to store a large amount of data and store rare blocks (miners do not need to store the entire Arweave chain unlike other blockchains). Since storing a block that not many miners have, means you will have less competition when competing to mine a block. As expected, when a miner adds a block they are rewarded with an Arweave token.

Block: A block is merely a group of transactions or data stored on the blockchain.

Miner: At a surface level, miners are computers that store and add blocks to the blockchain.

How Does Someone Store Data on Arweave

Paying to store data on the Arweave protocol is merely a one time payment. Some of that payment goes to the computers storing the data, but a large percentage goes to a fund. That fund is used to incentivize miners to store data when data storing becomes unprofitable.

Side Note: It is highly unlikely that that data storing becomes unprofitable because year after year data storage costs have continuously fallen.

Wrap up

Overall, Arweave is a blockchain that is designed to store data forever that has a lot of interesting applications, for instance, deploying website front-ends. Whether it is a good alternative to IPFS is up to you to decide. Do you need certain data to be permanently stored or are you willing to lose that information decades from now for potentially cheaper storage prices?