Arweave: Decentralize the Cloud
Arweave is a new type of storage that for the very first time allows users and developers to own and store data forever in a decentralized way.

When we want to store data, we think of using old USB sticks or new cloud storage services like Amazon Web Services. But with the risks of using centralized platforms growing, people are looking for more permanent ways to store their data.

Some of the most recent notable data breaches are:

Facebook was breached in 2019 but decided not to notify over 530 million users that their personal data was stolen — and shortly after that, posted to a public database — until April of 2021.
In November 2019, an attack hit Alibaba’s Chinese shopping website Taobao that impacted more than 1.1 billion pieces of user data. The stolen data included user IDs, mobile phone numbers, and customer comments.
In 2021, LinkedIn fell victim to a data-scraping breach affecting 700 million LinkedIn profiles.
To fight against data breaches, Arweave developed the blockweave, a new data storage technology based on a blockchain-like structure.

The blockweave solves the problem of storing information in a secure location where it can’t be modified and could be retrieved quickly when needed.

If you want to store data for 50, 100, or even 200 years, Arweave has options for that.

It provides a reliable archive of records. Once data is added, it can’t be removed or altered, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Arweave’s network lives on the permaweb: a global, community-owned web that anyone can contribute to.

The permaweb looks just like the normal web, but all of its content — from images to applications — is permanent and decentralized.

User interactions with Arweave’s permaweb apps require a fee paid in AR tokens, Arweave’s native currency.

That spend includes a miner fee, storage endowment fee, and a tip. While the first two power the broader ecosystem, the tip provides a revenue stream for Community Founders and Contributors.

To store a file on Arweave, a developer pays some amount of AR tokens as a network fee ($5-$10/GB) to store data for 200 years.

In comparison, Amazon charges only $0.276/GB per year for its low-tier pricing.

However, Arweave doesn’t claim to compete with Amazon on cost. Arweave users are explicitly paying a premium for something that Amazon can’t offer — permanent storage.

1 GB costs roughly $9 with Bundlr, a storage scaling platform powered by Arweave.

So a movie that’s 4–10 GB will cost roughly $36-$90 to upload the whole thing once, and that’s it. From there on, it lives for generations.

Even tech leaders are realizing the importance of permanent file storage on Arweave.

On November 3, Stephane Kasriel, head of commerce and financial technologies at Meta, disclosed an Arweave integration on Twitter.

In particular, Arweave will be used to store digital collectibles (NFTs) on Instagram, a functionality that has recently been added.

We expect a large increase in activity on the network in the coming months. And more activity means more demand for the AR token, as it’s the utility that powers and governs the network.

In the past 30 days, the network generated over $100,000 in fees for the ecosystem, an impressive 150% increase. It now has over 100 tebibytes (TiBs) of data stored, a 280% increase from last year.

Arweave has a market cap of $322 million. Meanwhile, its main competitor, Filecoin, has an all-time-high market cap of $12 billion.

If Arweave reaches Filecoin’s all-time high, it would be a 3,627% increase from today’s level.