Arweave (AR) Review

Arweave aims to make information permanence sustainable. Arweave describes itself as a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to store data forever. As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave aims to allow users to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. By preserving history, it prevents others from rewriting it.

Arweave is built on four core technologies that work together to create low cost, high-throughput, permanent storage on a new blockchain. These are:

• Blockweave
• Proof of Access
• Wildfire
• Blockshadows

While these technologies are intertwined, each plays a pivotal role in creating a new type of network suited for both fast transactions and low-cost permanent storage. Arweave introduces two new concepts that allow nodes to fulfill key network functions without possessing the whole chain. The first of these concepts is the block hash list, a list of the hashes of all previous blocks. This allows old blocks to be verified, and potential new blocks evaluated effectively. The second of these concepts is the wallet list, a list of all active wallets in the system. This allows transactions to be verified without possessing the block in which the last transaction was used. Using these blockhash list and wallet lists synchronized by the network and available for download by the miners, nodes are able to join the network and participate in mining the weave almost immediately.