Arweave is the infrastructure for the permanent storage of human ingenuity as the Library of Alexandria in the age of Web 3.0. Web3.0 is accelerating, and Arweave will be adopted by more and more developers as an infrastructure, creating a new and more colorful ecosystem.
The Arweave network has surpassed more than 200 applications in categories such as social networking, infrastructure, content distribution, authentication tools and many more. We believe there is a very strong market demand for social infrastructure based on solutions for permanent data storage.
**Relation is building the decentralized social graph protocol which is built in a bottom-up way, in a decentralized manner by the individuals and the communities to issue the Semantic Soulbound Tokens. **Relation is exploring the Semantic SoulBound tokens on Arweave and storing the Semantic meaning of the social relations around people, about their attributes, interests and other information like membership, affiliations. Everything socially related about this person on Arweave is in the structure model which follows the graph data structure.
In Relation Talk #8, a group of Web3 builders from Relation, Arweave, everVision, decent.land and 4EVERLAND came together to share their thoughts on Identity, Social and Permanent Storage on Arweave. The discussions among the speakers are recorded as follows:
Host
- Jessica, Founder of Relation. Relation is building a Web3 social graph infrastructure that will host the next generation of billions of DApps, and empower souls and communities to co-build reputation and a better society on Web3 with SBTs and relationship data. Relation has launched Web3 social Dapp Relation ONE and the Semantic SBT standard which will create a chain native data layer that is easy to query, share and reuse with lower friction.
Speaker
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Abhav, Chief of Staff at Arweave. Arweave is a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever — for the very first time.
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Romain, Branding Manager of everVision. everVision provides Arweave-based infrastructures for anyone who wants to build on Web3 using everPay, Permaswap, PermaDAO, and the development tool: Web3Infra.
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Benjamin, Founder of decent.land. decent.land is a set of web3 social protocols for identity, DAO governance and social networking. Built on Arweave, decent.land stores all data on-chain immutable and permanent.
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Chris Banks, SMM of decent.land.
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Val, Global Marketing Head of 4EVERLAND. 4EVERLAND is a Web 3.0 cloud computing platform that integrates storage, computing, and network as its core capabilities. It aims to help users make a smooth leap from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and become the infrastructure for millions of Web 3.0 developers and applications.
Question One
First of all, I would like to invite @Abhav to give a quick introduction to the current situation of the Arweave ecosystem to everyone. Arweave is also currently doing smart contracts, what is the difference or advantage over public chains like Ethereum?
**Abhav (Chief of Staff at Arweave): “**So, as for the state of the Arweave ecosystem, in my personal opinion, I think Arweave has had an interesting point, such that a lot of the necessary infrastructure that’s required for the reliable and scalable access to Arweave’s storage network has been built out over the last few years, and the ecosystem isn’t a place where you can now build massively scalable applications on top.
So, a team that’s building smart contract infrastructure on Arweave yesterday released an ecosystem map, about hundred projects that are building on top of Arweave in a substantial way with use-cases across NFTs, smart contracts and permanent storage. I also recently saw a tweet from Sam that showed that they are now dependent on Arweave’s JavaScript-client library.
So, the ecosystem is sort of at an interesting point the way I see it. As for the differences with smart contracts, the main difference comes from the fact that Arweave nodes do not come to consensus on the state of smart contracts per se. So, nodes do not have to actually execute smart contracts by creating or validating blocks, Instead, smart contracts are just data transactions. So, the code, the initial state and all interactions in a contract are added as regular data transactions to the Arweave Blockweave.
The current state of any smart contract is then evaluated lazily when it is needed by the client. So, this means that smart contracts are more scalable since they are not limited by the computing capacity of the network. Another key difference with Arweave’s smart contract, which I think makes an interesting case for putting NFTs on Arweave is that on typical smart contract chains like Ethereum the contract is the primary asset and it is only loosely associated with the data that it points to. It’s usually a link that points to some metadata which is usually stored to some centralized server. Even if it’s stored on some reliable infrastructure, what we’ve seen in a lot of cases is that a lot of contracts end up pointing to the same file. And in that case, what do you really own in that NFT?
So, with Arweave NFT contracts on the other hand, the data comes first and contract coders atomically associate with this data.* So, you only have one contract for a piece of data. So, I think that’s what I see as the two differences**.”***
Question Two
We know the recent loss of metadata of Solana NFTs hosted on a centralized server. Decentralized storage is necessary for Web3 builders to remove reliance on intermediaries. Any more use cases you think we will have, and when do you think the demand for permanent storage is most likely to explode?
**Chris Banks (SMM of decent.land): “**I know that the metadata and the permanent storage is extremely important there. Obviously, with what just happened we can look at what’s probably the reason that Meta and Instagram have chosen Arweave for their NFT storage, probably in part of the situation that did happen. The ability to create a once pay, once for storage within our lifetimes and our children’s children lifetime is a huge achievement by Arweave.
We are using EXM for arc to build an identity manager that is permanent. We are working on a UX that is friction-free and user-friendly as possible. EXM turns Arweave into a powerful; data and execution layer basically and we’re doing some amazing things with it. If you want to touch on that now*.”***
Val (Global Marketing Head of 4everland): “It seems that due to some recent events with some centralized exchanges, there is a new trend in the whole industry and this is what could be clearly seen from discussions with lots of projects. So, once again, there is a trend and the trend is emerging. For huge amounts of projects, decentralization doesn’t mean decentralization of the NFT metadata or of anything else. It’s like decentralization of everything that exists in that project and therefore, they are looking for solutions like Arweave. So, this is what I see as how the market evolves.
Recent events, with the fall of centralized exchanges, really influenced the whole industry. It also seems that decentralized storage can be really interesting for a couple of niches in Web3.0. A team is building a decentralized science project, DeSci guys, involving some crypto and decentralization.
It’s often important for them to store these data as long as possible. Another sphere of course is NFTs which was already mentioned. Arweave generally speaking is the best solution for storing NFTs and if we are talking about the fate of NFTs in the future, it could be seen that you get more and more usability from the industry.
These NFTs are not only becoming the solution when it comes to making money but also to solve some problems like NFT ticketing. So, if we try to solve this problem, Arweave is the best solution because it provides you with metadata that could be proved, checked or traced. It won’t be deleted or something. So, I think, the future development of NFTs and generally speaking, the interests of the Web3.0 industry. These are the trends that I see in the market*.”***
Chris Banks (SMM of decent.land): “Even beyond NFTs, like how we can store every layer of the application stack. You can use layer-2s on top of Arweave, like EXM and warp for the smart contract piece. You can store application UI on 4EVERLAND or Arweave.dev and then to address the issues of proof of work chain which takes long to mine, there is stuff like AR seeding and Bundler which can do the instant data availability of that. Combining that basically can give end users and developers a Web2.0 like experience but with falling back to how robust Arweave is and the tool that it provides.”
**Abhav (Chief of Staff at Arweave): “**Yes, I completely agree. I think that UIs being hosted on Arweave is an underrated feature that permanent storage actually enables. What that essentially means is that you can now develop apps that give users and developers on top of web applications.
Provability guaranteed that the platform will not sort of like move under their feet. As you have seen, platform integrity, risk has been a problem for creators, developers across the evolution of Web2.0. That’s a big one.
Another one that’s a use case of permanent storage which I find super interesting is the fact that a project called Alex.* I’m not sure if anyone has heard of it. It’s a cool idea that incentivizes archival of data on Arweave. It is a cool idea based on two observations; One, that it’s important for the world to archive conversations around controversial events; Covid policies, Ukraine Russian war etc.*
All of these events are unfolding in real time and you have a lot of people that have lots of opinions about these events. So, it is important to archive this so that historians can later piece together what actually happened, but who pays for something like this? That’s not clear. The second observation is that during the NFT craze we saw that people value being associated with content, meaning and communities. Alex is built on this idea that you can combine these two operations to actually incentivize people to contribute to pools that actually are then used to archive this information.
So, for example, potential NFT owners can contribute some funds to a pool and then those funds are used to upload data to the Arweave network, and each time data is uploaded it’s actually uploaded as an NFT. This NFT is randomly distributed to one of the contributors in proportion to their share in the pool. What that does is that; one, it gives NFT selectors a chance to own a piece of history. This project Alex was actually called heroes of history before. It also creates a public boldness; to incentivize the preservation of this data for a really long period of time.
So, that gives another full use case that permanent storage enables that hasn’t been explored so far but is now being*.”***
Question Three
The biggest problem with most public chains today is the inability to store large amounts of hypermedia data on their chains; blockchains are made to do bookkeeping functions, not storage functions yet. As a storage layer for on-chain data, what role does Arweave play, and what market gap can it solve?
**Val (Global Marketing Head of 4everland): “**Well, I assume that this question is closer related to the question of decentralized storage. Yes, for sure, we can actually store media on the chain but is there any sense in that’ll make us do that? This is a point of thinking, we could use Arweave for storing data on-chain for sure, in all these spheres where we need to prove something. For example, if we have to prove that this piece of information is yours or created at that point in time, i.e., in that point of time it exists and can’t get deleted, all these needs form the marketing gap which exists nowadays.
For sure, I think that if we look at the market, the biggest need of storage is again the sphere of NFTs, the metadata for NFTs and storing this metadata is an important issue. Still, lots of projects use centralized storages, and once their centralized storages deletes the data then the value of the data is no longer with that collection.
At the same time, we have already mentioned that there are a lot of use-cases and I really like the use-case of traditional spheres. I think when we were talking about carrying information about some conflicts, maybe social issues, it’s really important for the journalism sphere, they could use this as a solution for their own projects. I think this gap for sure exists on the market but as Arweave ecosystem projects, our own mission is to assimilate people and make them understand why they should use Arweave.
It seems like in the Web3.0 industry this understanding is becoming more real due to recent events with decentralization as a trend*.”***
**Chris Banks (SMM of decent.land): “**I know we all worry as far as where our information comes from and if they are verifiable and attestable, you know that this is genuine information. I think Arweave can fill that gap, I know there are a few Dapps working on something like microtransactions that reward monetized systems of upvoting etc., where the user can be basically verified by the community for the information that they are putting out there. With Arweave, it really kind of solidifies it with e permanence on chain.
I think in the social media aspect, in all the kinds of platforms that are out there, this is some of the gaps that Arweave can help fill, and with the protocol, we’re linking Web3.0 identities across multiple chains.
Chain agnostic or multi chain or however you want to call it is going to become a thing of the past and figuring out ways to get these blockchains to communicate with each other and link your identities so that at the end of the day, people really know who is who and who is publishing what across Web3.0*.”***
**Abhav (Chief of Staff at Arweave): “**To add, Jessica, it seems like you initially sought Arweave out because your existing storage provider was giving you limits on hypermedia storage. I would love to get your take on this. Essentially, I mentioned earlier that Arweave has permanent storage and you pay upfront for two hundred years of storage but actually the cost of doing that ends up not being that much although it sounds like a lot, it ends up being about 1 cent per megabyte in today’s value. So, you could store like hundreds of gigabytes on Arweave at not that much cost of storage.
I did pin something to the top and that’s something that Benjamin has built, the Permacast app and that’s you know being able to store podcasts which obviously are huge amounts of information with Arweave and hyperdata. So, if you want to take a look at that guy*.”***
**Jessica (Founder of Relation Labs): “**We actually found out that some builders including us tried to explore a variety of solutions, because different chains will have different features and some of them are trying to explore the computation on chain and exploring the hosting of databases on chain.
They all have their limitations. Yes, I do love the technology of permanent storage of Arweave, no limits on storage. It’s quite helpful when we are storing a large amount of data on the chain.
We are hosting pictures for the Semantic SoulBound tokens on Arweave and we are also exploring the Semantic SoulBound tokens on Arweave. So that means that we are storing the Semantic meaning of the social relations around people, about their attributes, interests and other information like membership, affiliations. That is, everything is socially related about this person on Arweave, in the structure model which follows the graph data structure.
We are utilizing the resource description framework so it’s just a short statement of the graph data model in this expression like subject, predicate and object.* It’s very simple, for example Alice knows Bob, and Alice.eth knows Bob.eth, so it’s something like this and it is a short text**.”***
Question Four
As Arweave’s permaweb is not private, all data is permanently public and directly accessible and is not suitable for storing personal data or some sensitive data, which organizations and companies do you think that Arweave is suitable for hosting their data? Is it suitable for social applications？
Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “I think there are encryption options available as you mentioned, it would be possible for example to create within a social application you could create like a private area where it is only accessible by people who hold this DAO token or NFT. So, the encrypted data would be stored on Arweave in the browser unlike the local side of things. There’d be a way to decrypt, similar to how you can login and decrypt your messages on telegram or something like that.”
Romain (Branding Manager of everVision): “Just to add on that, isn’t accord, isn’t there stuff private? They have vaults, right?”
**Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “**Yes, accord and Hardrive do this. Sort of using in house self-made encryption solutions. There actually aren’t that many open-source public ways to do this. Accord and Hardrive have both kind of done their own in house. There is a tool called selfguard.xyz, they have done a proof of concept on uploading something with your Arweave wallet then being able to specify who is in the group and who is able to decrypt it. By that way, you will be able to make members only areas, for stuff that only you can see if you have connected your whitelisted Arweave wallet on the front end, so that’s possible.
I think as far as Social goes, I see a big drive in appetite for there to be no way to delete stuff after the fact. Or at least for there to be a way to provide publicly auditable edit history.* For example, when you see big tweets and stuff like that then get deleted. Someone has screenshotted that and then they will want to share it. Just generally talking from the public square should be the source of truth perspective. I think it’s a good thing that Arweave kind of holds the people who said things accountable to their opinions in the first place, because already you see circumvention by the public using tools like simply screenshotting in order to bring the truth back to light.*
I think it’s generally a public good for everyone*.”***
Abhav (Chief of Staff at Arweave): “I agree I think public forum, public square like applications is where Arweave really shines for social applications, and there is an appetite for this. Even benevolent dictators that we’ve seen end up harming free speech with recent actions on platforms.”
Jessica, (Founder of Relation Labs): “Relation is building the decentralized social graph protocol and the social graph is built in a bottom-up way, i.e., in a decentralized manner by the individuals and the communities to issue the Semantic Soulbound tokens, to capture the attributes of this person and also the social relationships that they may have. For example, the friendships, memberships and affiliations that they hold.
All these information captured by the SBTs in the metadata follows a structure model which is in the resource description framework in a short expression in the subject, predicate and object. We are built on the EVM chains on Arweave.* We are actually hosting a lot of the social relationships on Arweave and they are now all public.*
We also have the project plan to investigate the private Soul Bound tokens, which means that the hash of the data is on the EVM chain so the data is actually, maybe as a sensitive data, like a passport, content created by journalists for example, something private. The data will be on Arweave and will be token gated, so that some of the token holders can view this data when necessary and this will have a lot of use-cases.
For example, storing some personal sensitive data for the creators and decentralized verification cases. This is how we plan to investigate this to support social relationships on Web3.0.
Following the existing NFT standard which is non-transferrable and also has rdf metadata that captures the meaning and having the hash of the data on chain and the data is actually encrypted and also on Arweave*.”***
Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “That makes sense, I think a lot of it actually stands around Arweave’s NFT standard, that is maybe a little bit too early to commit to. Even the NFTs standards, never mind that of the Soul Bound token standards. I think that’s something that the Arweave community needs to come together on and to make a concrete spec around.”
Jessica (Founder of Relation Labs): “Yes, I agree with that. We believe in this identity field, it’s quite early and under standardized. However, I think it’s pretty much okay. We need to investigate and explore more and later, when it becomes more mature, we can have time to have some standards.”
Question Five
There are still relatively few identity building and social applications on the Arweave ecosystem, why did you consider the AR ecosystem and how do you combine the features of Arweave to empower your products?
**Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “**First of all, I think that the Arweave identity part, like your literal wallet address, goes hand in hand with the Arweave social layer infrastructure. Like we would have the option via Bundler or AR seeding to just proxy data uploads via something more centralized like just paying for their uploads. However, I think that takes way control and identity, attribution and ownership from users themselves. That is the reason why we initially built decent.land on Arweave, more recently was EXM. EXM is like a smart contract layer two on top of Arweave.
For us it replaced smartweave, smartweave was like the original smart contract layer on Arweave that used the bare Arweave protocol. EXM is kind of like a layer on top, it is lightning fast and very extensible as well. So, we kind of ran with that and built out a library of decent.land developer tooling called molecule.sh which expands EXM and makes it possible to sign Arweave smart contracts with wallets on other blockchains.
So, like Ethereum, Solana wallets, we recently added support for like Ziliqa, and substrate-based chains like Polkadot. With that there it makes Arweave like the perfect master identity layer, where you can settle back your identity to. This tooling kind of makes it possible to aggregate multiple identities into one and that’s kind of the whole mission behind our protocol.
Your Arweave public key, your address as you got master identity on a whole bunch of different apps, but it is able to verify that you are the same person on Ethereum, Solana, Near or a whole bunch of different protocols that it can talk to via our protocol.
So, we chose Arweave mostly because it is able to store a large amount of data cheaply and that’s pretty important for the Arc oracle.* The arc oracle provides aggregated API feeds. It stores aggregated API feeds in order to sort of tell other apps about the token balances that you hold.*
An Arweave app using our protocol can understand that you own a BoredApe on Ethereum and that this is your Arweave address for that. Then you can deploy a DAO tooling protocol on Arweave that would be like, you can only vote if you own a Bored ape, or if the Bored ape has this particular trait. So, when we are storing large amounts of data like say you own like a million NFTs and you need all the metadata for it, Arweave is really the only thing that makes sense. And with the way we have been able to expand EXM to be able to talk to other protocols, there’s no real need for us to move off of Arweave and pay for more expensive storage elsewhere for the same sort of Oracle service.
So that’s kind of like why we came to Arweave in the first place and why we keep sticking around**.”**
Chris Banks (SMM of decent.land):* From a non-technical standpoint, and having linked my identity with Arweave protocol. I am so excited about it from a user standpoint, I know we really need to start seeing some of these Arweave Dapps from the ecosystem build out better UX. Some of them are really just a little painful to look at, obviously there’s some amazing coding going on in the background, but we need to make it as frictionless as possible and I know we are still getting there. We are just slowly migrating to Arweave too***.”**
Romain (Branding Manager of everVision): “I actually agree with that. You know there’s also AR connect, and its kind of like a little hard to look at but the team is doing a fantastic job with that, so that will be looking sweet anytime now.”
**Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “**Yes, ArConnect is one of the most foundational tools on top of the ecosystem. We are really excited, I have been talking with the team, and they are going to integrate the same kind of thing. You know how in MetaMask, you can send Eth to a .eth address? It’s going to be possible to send to .R address using the ANS lookup on that.
As well as that they also integrated feeds of crypto from the ecosystem into the wallet as well. ArConnect is about to enter a new era which is good because it helps everyone. It is the entry point into the ecosystem, maybe it wasn’t supposed to be, like I know originally, Arweave maintained its own wallet which was deprecated in place of ArConnect, but you know, whether you like it or not, wallets are the one of the most key pieces of infrastructure.
To see improvement coming along the pipeline for that is amazing**.”**
Romain (Branding Manager of everVision): “There’s other things that he’s planning to have as well, so it’s going to look pretty good for the ecosystem. Hopefully it just brings more eyes to projects who deserve it which is pretty cool, like you guys for example. Oh, and I really like what Permaswap is doing.”
Question Six
At present, there are many concepts and ideas on how to implement digital identity in the industry: some think that the DID may become the most developed digital identity on chain, while others think that the SBT (SoulBound Tokens) concept recently proposed by Vitalik may be a good form of paradigm for the digital identity.
Do you think there is a viable solution for a Web3.0 digital identity powered by Arweave? If so, what is it? If not, what are the current bottlenecks in developing digital identities?
Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “I think that it would end up being a combination of both things. Like DIDs and SBTs.* DIDs will serve the purpose of a core top-level identity layer like username, social bio, references to like what your profile picture is etc. That’s what we built with ANS like an all-in-one username social meta data, pay once own forever. Then SBTs, I think they are more suited to stuff like achievements and credentials like elements of a user identity that won’t expire that you can hold to one identity forever.*
An issue with this, something that I have been talking about with the team and with some partners, is that SBTs are kind of unable to be recovered if a user loses access to their keys. This is obviously like one of the biggest problems in crypto but if we see that they kind of scale up to the level where SBTs replace things like university diplomas, we need some kind of escape hatch for that in order to recover it.
We are looking to implement SBTs as part of the Identity layer of decent.land.* One thing that we are working on is being able to reset or recover the address for it. So if you can prove that you own the wallet that’s being set as the recovery address, like for example by submitting a transaction to the chain that it’s on and using R protocol and attesting to that identity.*
Then it’s still technically SoulBound like bound to the human being that was able to attest the most that they own both.* Then the recovery address should be able to trigger the address of the SoulBound tokens under those like special escape hatch circumstances.*
That’s like one issue I see with the SoulBound tokens and our solution for it. I agree both things are kind of like necessary DID is like for the top-level identity, a lot of people go by their .eth, .R address, or their .lens handle. This is the core identity of who you are with your core metadata attached but then as a tack on that, I did this or that, attended this event, that would be up to the role of SBTs.
To be honest, SBTs are a very good idea because they are very top-level. For example, it is easy for an application to determine whether you do or don’t own it. They do not necessarily need to dig into the smart contract state of some distant contract. To be able to see whether you are in the owner’s list. It’s like the tokens in your account, that’s very good from the integration perspective and gaining adoption more widely.
So, I’m behind both. I think both are the future, there’s not really a trade off there**.”**
**Jessica (Founder of Relation Labs): “**I agree with you. There’s not one single solution that fits for all. DID and Verified Credentials can be one. And we think the way of combining the domain names and SoulBound tokens can be another one, and worth building on. To investigate the identity in a way that is social because people are connected with each other in some way. Also, fragmentary, i.e., not a single identifier can be all, people may have different avatars, to travel across different metaverses.
For example, people may hold ENS, ANS and may have different avatars in professional forums or interest groups. It’s important for people to show a different part of their souls. This is also a way to help solve the problem of recovery. That there are already some wallets helping people make social recovery with the help of the centralized institution. With Semantic SoulBound tokens, we may have some other ways to make the recovery of the wallet.
It’s like you are assigning some of the trusted contacts and letting them help you make the recovery when necessary. It’s just like Facebook recovery, and it is a more decentralized way to verify your identity and make sure that your identity is not stolen. One other thing worth investigating is the scarlet letter issue, both the DID plus VC and domain name plus SBT are not good enough to avoid this. It’s like receiving something you don’t want to be public, an active reputation**.”**
Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “Like the issue of there needing to be a disavow function almost inside the SoulBound function and contract.”
Abhav (Chief of Staff at Arweave): “People should only be able to read ownership of NFTs that I give them access to. So, someone might give me an NFT that I don’t want to be displayed and associated with my account, I guess.”
Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “It puts the onus of on the receiver to then go and ensure that they are only representing the best part of themselves. Maybe it’s possible from a technical perspective to only get an SBT if you are the person who is whitelisted for it. Then you are the one who then claims it to your wallet manually as well.”
Abhav (Chief of Staff at Arweave): “*I guess one way to solve that is to basically vet the actual issuer of the token right. So, if I go around handing people, this person is bad, this person is bad, then people will probably, applications that probably care about your reputation and mine will not listen to me.*”
Romain (Branding Manager of everVision): “*I think what Abhav was saying was actually pretty good. Having a reputation for apps, or maybe issuers.*”
Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “I think that there are a bunch of on-chain reputation scoring systems out there right now.* One is Nomics score, it is able to aggregate how likely you are to be an actual user of stuff like how many apps do you interact with, how many NFTs have you got? What is the velocity and veracity of your on-chain activity?*
This would stop people making burner wallets to spam people with rubbish*.***”
Romain (Branding Manager of everVision): “*For anyone listening, BAR is burn AR, anytime you upload anything on Arweave you receive BAR basically, I guess a proof of use. Just showing that you are actually a user. BAR doesn’t really have a use-case for now. We’ll see what it does in the future though.*”
**Benjamin, (Founder of decent.land): “**Do I get BAR by uploading to any given application?
Romain (Branding Manager of everVision): “*From what I understood, it’s when you use Arweave. I think the biggest holder of BAR is probably bundler since they do obviously all these transactions. I am fairly new to this BAR thing, found out about it two weeks ago, so I’m really keen on seeing what is happening with BAR and how it will be used.*”
Abhav (Chief of Staff at Arweave): “Just to answer the question that Benjamin asked, to get BAR, whenever you upload anything to Arweave, if you add the appropriate smartweave transaction tags, then you get BAR. It is just another smart weave contract and you can mint BAR by uploading data and including the smartweave contract tag.”
Romain (Branding Manager of everVision): “Who’s behind the BAR? Did Arweave make it or other team**”**
Abhav (Chief of Staff at Arweave): “*I don’t know. It was definitely not Arweave, I don’t know who uploaded the main contract source code.*”
Free Discussion 1
What do you see as the future of Arweave for large-scale application scenarios?
**Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “**I think in the very beginning, I’ve been in Arweave for quite some time, only recently, maybe last year as Arweave became appropriate for full large scale application scenarios. I think there are multiple things. It’s more cases to this, who are building layers on top of the Arweave network to help solve this.
Like getting AR tokens itself in the US, especially, is an issue and so like everpay Permaswap isn’t on Ramp via Eth. Then you have instant data availability to give a Web2.0 experience, and AR seeding and Bundler fix that for both for the data availability part and the payment proxying part where you can pay with Sol, Matic or Eth. For uploads on Arweave and so this kind of negates any kind of issue that an application developer can have like not having direct contact with the Arweave chain itself.
Another thing is a round gateway decentralization, so, everything right now is hitting Arweave.net, mostly in order to resolve transaction ids. Like you know, most of these NFT metadata, okay we hear Arweave.dev/ the Tx id, ARIO is fixing that by essentially being able to do custom gateways which are able to monetize in their own way. They are able to specialize in their own way so application developers can basically get their own gateway which sort of sidesteps the need for their own decentralization around Arweave.net.
As well as that, we know Arweave is a small chain. It is very powerful for data storage but it is not necessarily where the transfers of value, reputation or identity happens. So, we are building an Arc protocol for that to break down the silos between chains. To be able to say, this is my Arweave address, this is also my ETH and Sol address and I’m this one person, linked back and it’s all settled on Arweave.
So, I think that that helps put more awareness on larger scale application awareness. You know you have decentralized gateways; payment proxies and you are able to get AR tokens in the US via a DEX using everPay as well as Arc protocol.
There are a lot of developments that have happened in the last year, maybe even less than a year, that are bringing Arweave more in the realm of mainstream, large-scale adoption*.***”
Romain (Branding Manager of everVision): “*The part where the community starts working together now is doing something for the ecosystem as well. Before, everyone was kind of doing their own thing and building the same things. Now, I guess people are working more and more together. It’s also something that can hopefully help out this beautiful ecosystem.*”
Abhav (Chief of Staff at Arweave): “*I agree, I think that has been summarized pretty well thanks for that.*”
Free Discussion 2
Lastly, do you have any upcoming product updates or campaigns that our audiences can join?
Chris Banks (SMM of decent.land): “ANS, Arweave name service and our .AR names that are hundred percent permanent without renewal fees and without protocol. You are able to link everything, even your .eth name, lens and Twitter all sorts of social media information along with wallets across multiple chains.* A cool way to do that and have it personalized rather than just using your Arweave address with Arweave name service.*
We just booked our tickets for Eth Denver. We’re going to be out there, there’s a Near day, and then the Eth events as well, just because we can communicate across those chains. We are going to be launching it after that, our Arweave name service, more of invite only. We are slowly trying to build our Discord community.
Check us out on Discord if anyone is interested in finding out more, lots of links go into our GitHub and open source about the things that are going on at decent.land. So, come on by and get in there now, so that you have access to an invite only coming on probably in the 30 to 60 days*.***”
**Benjamin (Founder of decent.land): “**We went around with a QR code that you could scan, as an early ANS adopter. Then, you are able to link your EVM address with your Arweave address using Arc protocol. Making it so that it is possible to receive your ANS domain in your Arweave address despite the fact that you had only scanned an Ethereum address.
So, this was kind of like a promotion and a demonstration of how the protocol can make attestations across different chains to prove who you are. We are going to be doing the same thing in Eth Denver as well. So, if anyone’s coming to Eth Denver, you can DM Chris, Max, our new developer.
Get your PoAp and be one of the, right now we have around 600 users of ANS, with invite only, So, all of these people have either being airdropped it based on their activities on Arweave or they have basically completed tasks or challenges we have put forward to the community for gaining an ANS name.
A way to get it really easy is to come meet us at Denver*.***”
**Romain (Branding Manager of everVision): “**Just wanted to say that AR drive is going to be hosting an Arweave event at EthDenver, so if three are any builders here listening and they are interested in building on Arweave or that don’t know anything about Arweave, just keep an eye out for that. Go follow AR Drive on Twitter, AR.io on twitter and I’m sure that they will be posting things like that.
Really what the AR ecosystem wants is just the best builders on this planet. It‘s just getting all these big brain people and making sure that we could just move forward together*.***”
Jessica (Founder of Relation Labs): “*To wrap this up this year, we also have new year free gifts for all those who are interested in getting one, starting from tomorrow. So, please follow our official twitter handles.*”
That’s all for the recap of Relation Talk #8. Thanks for reading!