Arweave Review 2025 – What is Arweave?

Arweave launched in 2018 and surged to all-time highs during the bull market run of 2021. Although other crypto projects have captured the spotlight, the project has quietly become the most successful storage-based crypto protocol, providing long-term storage for many other blockchains. In this Arweave review, we’ll examine its value proposition as well as the new AO chain, which will leverage the data stored by Arweave itself.

Drawing several parallels to Bitcoin, Arweave seeks to provide a permanent ledger for speech and data – rather than just transactions – without a need for an intermediary. Let’s begin the Arweave review with an overview of the protocol and the problems it solves.

Due to its permanent storage capabilities, Arweave has become home to many leading NFT collections. This provides a safe haven for digital assets that may be at risk on legacy web servers. Instead, these images and assets exist in perpetuity on Arweave’s blockweave, a worldwide network of storage nodes run by miners. The protocol also holds chain data for other chains, creating a safe storage space for blockchain data to sync with new nodes.

Users pay once for storage, using $AR tokens, to store data indefinitely. The protocol incentivizes miners to store more data by using randomized checks, ensuring user data exists on multiple nodes.

Similar projects include Filecoin and IPFS, both of which still face long-term viability challenges that Arweave has solved. This is evidenced by Arweave’s growing use by leading NFT projects and other blockchains.

Arweave’s Use Cases

Businesses and individual users rely on cloud storage providers such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. However, these providers use gated access and charge ongoing storage fees. Additionally, none of these services can ensure permanent storage.

Arweave charges a one-time, dynamic fee paid in $AR tokens. The storage fee varies based on the amount of data, expected costs for future storage (according to a formula based on Kryder’s Law), and network difficulty. This pay-once-store-forever structure makes Arweave well-suited to several use cases.

Decentralized File Storage:

Businesses and individuals can use Arweave to store any kind of data. Tools like ArDrive provide a user-friendly interface similar to those used by other cloud storage providers.

• Personal Archives: Store important documents, photos, videos, and other personal files permanently. Files and virtual drives can be shared with others. Many users also use Arweave for notes using tools like Permanotes.
• Business Data: Secure critical business records, intellectual property, and customer data in encrypted form indefinitely.

NFT Storage:

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), particularly those granting digital media rights, can be problematic. While the token itself is immutable on the blockchain, the asset to which it grants rights may be stored on a legacy web server. Obvious risks include deletion or replacement at the same URL. Arweave solves this problem by providing a storage solution for NFT metadata and associated files, making NFTs accessible forever and preventing broken links.

By some estimates, as much as 70% of Solana NFTs minted during the NFT boom were hosted on Arweave. Another strategy called Atomic NFTs stores all elements of the NFT on the Arweave platform, including media, contract, and metadata. Several other chains, such as Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon, also support direct access to Arweave storage.

Web3 Applications:

Projects can use Arweave’s permanent decentralized storage to host UIs for Decentralized applications (dApps) in addition to related data, such as game assets for Web3 games. By comparison, the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), which is a competing decentralized storage protocol, can lose files that aren’t “pinned” to the network if the host node goes offline.

Data Preservation:

Arweave’s permanent storage allows the preservation of historical data, scientific research, press items, and other data that has cultural or scientific value. Following the start of the conflict in Ukraine, millions of documents were saved to Arweave, preserving history as well as the docs regardless of how the conflict may affect the country and region in the coming years.

Decentralized Publishing:

Web 2.0 offers countless publishing platforms, allowing ideas and individual perspectives to reach a wider audience. However, none of these platforms can guarantee permanence,e and some may even censor specific content or points of view. Innovative web applications like Mirror allow creators to log in using an Ethereum wallet and permanently store content on the Arweave platform.

Supply Chain Management:

Although real-world examples on a large scale don’t exist yet, Arweave can be used to store immutable records of supply chain transactions. Permanent storage ensures transparency and traceability. This use case may see further adoption with the launch of Arweave’s AO chain, which will allow greater interaction with Aweave-hosted data.

What Technology Does Arweave Use?

Although Arweave drew inspiration from projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, its functionality and underlying technology differ from those of most crypto projects. Arweave uses Succinct Proof of Random Access (SPoRA) as its consensus mechanism to incentivize miners. SPoRA was influenced by research that sought to use Bitcoin’s PoW consensus for data preservation. The resulting consensus mechanism, which replaced the legacy Proof of Access (POA) mechanism in 2024, promises higher scalability and lower energy usage.

Arweave’s thoughtful construction brings several features to the protocol that focus on permanent data storage. These include the Permaweb, Atomic NFTs, and an optimized environment for running smart contracts. Let’s review these features and components in more detail.

Arweave Permaweb

Although we like to think of the web as open, democratic, and censorship-resistant, the days of the free web have largely become a memory. Hosting providers, ISPs, governments, and publishing platforms can censor content and, in some cases, restrict or remove users. In 2019, Arweave introduced the Permaweb, an immutable, decentralized web that provides a permanent home for content and renews the promise of a censorship-free web.

Content hosted on Permaweb has a storage cost. However, the one-time cost for simple text content or hosting static sites is negligible compared to traditional web hosting or free web hosting, which may involve relinquishing your privacy, injecting ads, or censorship.

GraphQL Querying System

Earlier in this Arweave review, we mentioned GraphQL, an efficient data retrieval query language used to retrieve specific information from Arweave. Data within Arweave uses unique identifiers that function like transaction IDs on other blockchains. The query also supports tags, allowing it to retrieve filtered groups of data.

• Tags: Query groups of transactions that match specific criteria; tags allow users to create custom data structures and sorting systems
• Identifiers: Query specific transactions; identifiers act as pointers to content stored on Arweave’s network

Atomic NFTs

Traditional NFTs often involve a token that confers rights to a digital asset on a separate network, such as a web server. These can be separated. For example, the image associated with an NFT may be replaced or deleted. The token still exists, but the digital asset is no longer associated with it.

Arweave allows atomic NFTs, in which all the digital elements, including the media file, the smart contract, and the NFT’s metadata, become one unit. This structure prevents the digital asset from being separated from the NFT contract and preserves the NFT alongside its corresponding digital asset forever.

SmartWeave

SmartWeave is Arweave’s platform for developing and executing smart contracts. Smart contracts are programs that run on the blockchain and act as conditional triggers. We’ll discuss SmartWeave smart contacts in more detail later in the Arweave review.

Profit Sharing Tokens (PSTs) & Profit Sharing Communities (PSCs)

Arweave also offers a unique type of token called PSTs (profit-sharing tokens). Projects distribute these tokens to active community members or early adopters, allowing the community to share in the project’s success by earning a portion of revenue or profit.

Arweave introduces profit-sharing communities (PSCs) in addition to PSTs. These groups can represent holders of one or more PSTs.

Token holders in PSTs may also have voting rights, much like in a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), making some PSTs governance tokens in addition to yield-bearing tokens.

What Makes Arweave Unique?

Arweave’s buy-once-store-forever model makes it unique in the space. Competing protocols address markets that may not need perpetual storage. Let’s compare Arweave to similar protocols such as Filecoin and Storj.

Arweave also has a fixed supply of tokens, whereas Filecoin and Storj can mint new tokens. IPFS does not have a token, but Filecoin uses the protocol. Arweave’s fixed supply helped holders realize gains of up to 5x in 2024 compared to 2023 prices.

Many, including the project’s founders, see Arweave as the Bitcoin of file storage, offering permanent, immutable storage for media and other data. Arweave’s fixed supply is also reminiscent of Bitcoin. By comparison, Filecoin is inflationary, albeit with a decreasing inflation rate, making it more comparable to Dogecoin, a project loosely based on Bitcoin forks.

Arweave 2.0 and Beyond

As discussed earlier in this Arweave review, the project continues to seek new efficiencies that will help it achieve its goal of providing permanent, trustless storage. Arweave 2.0 launched in 2020, bringing faster transaction speeds and improved scalability while introducing features that made it easier for users to interact with the protocol.

As of this writing, the latest version is 2.8, which went live in November 2024. Each upgrade to the Arweave codebase uses a hard fork, in which miners must choose which version of the protocol to support. This approach is similar to Bitcoin’s, but it allows any contributor to participate rather than having updates pushed out by a core team, DAO, or other organization. Arweave details the process for “fair forks” in a paper published in 2022.

Arweave SmartWeave Contracts

Arweave’s smart contracts offer more flexibility compared to Ethereum, Solana, Sui, and other popular blockchains. SmartWeave smart contracts support several languages.

• JavaScript
• TypeScript
• Rust
• Go
• AssemblyScript
• WASM (WebAssembly)

Structurally, Arweave differs from other smart contract chains in that it focuses on on-chain data. By comparison, other blockchains, such as Ethereum and Solana, can access additional data using oracles, which are trusted data sources. However, Arweave can store data feeds on-chain, allowing similar functionality to Ethereum or Solana oracles with the added ability to leverage a massive store of data stored on the blockweave.

Who’s Behind Arweave?

The concept for Arweave began with Sam Williams, who first envisioned a permanent and decentralized web. Initially, the project began life as Archain, beginning with a whitepaper written by Williams in 2017 and preserved forever on Arweave. By 2018, the project had rebranded to Arweave and published a “yellow paper” detailing the goals of the project, the problems it solves, and its proposed structure.

Sam Williams – Founder

Sam Williams was (and is) a fan of Bitcoin, even doing some mining in Bitcoin’s early days. He also bought Ethereum during the ICO in 2014. Both cryptocurrencies influenced Arweave. Bitcoin’s fixed supply and proof of work helped to shape what would later become the Arweave protocol.

Williams was also inspired by Ethereum’s concept of a world computer but was disappointed in its limitations regarding scalability and use cases. Although Ethereum and its layer two chains comprise the bulk of decentralized finance usage, other use cases remain limited. Arweave sought to build for markets underserved by other blockchains by providing trustless data storage on a decentralized network.

William Jones – Co-Founder

William Jones, a co-founder of Arweave, played a crucial role in developing its core technology, including its innovative Proof-of-Access (PoA) consensus mechanism. This consensus mechanism evolved in 2021 with the rollout of SPoRa, bringing additional efficiencies.

Williams and Jones worked side by side to bring Arweave to fruition, although Willam Jones is no longer involved in the daily operations of the project.

Lev Berman, Sam Williams, Martin Torhage, and James Piechota are the leading GitHub contributors for Arweave. The largest number of commits (code additions) occurred between 2018 and 2019. This reduction in code changes over time is common among mature protocols such as Bitcoin or Arweave.

Arweave Future Outlook – Roadmap

Arweave’s roadmap is better described as an unwavering commitment to providing trustless data storage. However, The team has been busy with the next steps, with the most recent focus on a new blockchain that leverages the data hosted on Arweave. The new blockchain, AO, will launch in 2025.

AO, short for Actor Oriented, was created partially out of necessity after Arweave acquired the Odysee video hosting platform and needed ways to improve scalability by allowing temporary storage of less-viewed videos and permanent storage for popular content. The result was a supercharged computing platform that some refer to as the AO supercomputer.

AO uses a local state rather than a globally synchronized state, bypassing the roadblocks common to other blockchains that must reach a consensus on the state of the entire chain. This strategy makes the platform similar to running a virtual machine on a cloud service. AO allows parallel processing, boosting throughput and scaling as demand increases.

These innovations invite the development of new applications, which could include decentralized AI and machine learning as well as Web3 gaming and computationally intensive tasks such as simulations. Arweave’s permanent storage and time-tested security provide a solid foundation for builders.

We’ll discuss the $AO token and $AR token in the next section of the Arweave review.

Arweave Token

The $AR token acts as a payment method for storage on the network, ensuring demand for the token if storage demand remains strong. Arweave’s $AR token is also used to reward miners who provide storage and validate transactions.

While the initial allocations were split between several distribution methods, it’s important to consider the current circulating supply (65,454,185), which is close to the maximum supply of 66 million tokens.

Storage fees paid in $AR are paid, in part, to miners. However, the largest portion goes to the Arweave storage endowment, a fund designed to provide incentives to miners in the future, as needed. In the interim, these funds are removed from circulation.

The math behind the scenes requires that storage costs exceed block rewards plus fees. In effect, the endowment acts as an emergency fund. However, storage costs are expected to decrease over time.

Arweave created 55 million tokens at genesis, with some of these tokens going directly to the endowment. The remaining 11 million tokens were reserved for mining rewards. With most of the storage fees going to the endowment and storage costs expected to decrease over time, Arweave seems well-positioned for long-term sustainability.

Arweave $AO Token

Earlier, we mentioned the launch of the AO network, Arweave’s “supercomputer” blockchain. The AO network is scheduled go live on mainnet on February 8, 2025, with $AO tokens distributed via a fair launch to two groups.

Following an initial distribution of 15% to $AR holders expected on February 8, future tokens will be distributed as follows:

• $AR holders (33.3%)
• Users who bridge supported assets, such as liquid staked ETH or DAI (66.6%)

The focus on yield-bearing assets rewards those who bring new liquidity to the AO ecosystem. Users can bridge STETH or DAI using the Mint Page, which also includes a calculator to estimate AO allocations based on AR holdings.

Very similar to Bitcoin, AO will have a maximum supply of 21 million tokens, with a four-year halving schedule. This distribution schedule prolongs the release of the maximum supply but avoids Bitcoin’s sudden halvings by using monthly decreases that correspond to a four-year halving.

Arweave has received praise for its fair launch of AO. There was no presale or pre-allocation, and the community will mint 100% of the tokens.

This structure makes the Arweave coin a yield-bearing asset if held in a non-custodial wallet. Investors holding tokens on an exchange with a custodial Arweave wallet should contact their exchange to find out how the platform plans to allocate $AO. $AR token holders, as well as those who bridge STETH or DAI, will earn AO tokens. Notably, AO bridging rewards are not available to US residents.

Regulatory Considerations

The regulatory environment in certain jurisdictions, such as the US, can affect the price performance of Arweave. Notably, Crypto.com is the only larger US exchange to offer the token at the time of this writing. However, Binance, MEXC, and several other large exchanges offer the $AR token in other areas of the world.

Arweave may face regulatory challenges, including privacy related issues and those surrounding illegal content saved to an immutable network. Let’s examine some of these potential concerns in more detail.

Data Security and Privacy

The EU’s “Right to Erasure” under GDPR rules may be difficult to reconcile with Arweave’s permanent storage. Additionally, Arweave miners don’t filter content in any meaningful way. The protocol incentivizes storing as much data as possible and the community remains largely aligned in regard to censorship resistance and freedom of information. While individual miners can refuse to store specific data, doing so remains less likely due to the incentives to store data and strong community sentiment.

Cryptocurrency Regulations

Regulatory concerns regarding token classification and anti-money laundering (AML) parallel those for many other cryptocurrencies.

While regulatory bodies like the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have not weighed in on Arweave’s classification specifically, if the Arweave token were to be classified as a security, it could affect the token’s liquidity and trading markets. For example, Coinbase suspended trading for XRP in 2021, later returning it to its platform after a court ruling that stated XRP coins sold to secondary investors were not securities. A similar turn of events for Arweave could affect token values and adoption.

AML and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations are typically handled at the exchange level when trades occur. However, some regulators have expressed an interest in seeing decentralized protocols enforce measures to prevent money laundering and for combating the financing of terrorism (CFT).

Environmental Concerns

Arweave uses a combination of Proof of Work and Proof of Access to provide consensus on the network and secure transactions. Proof of work, in particular, has come under scrutiny by energy regulators and environmental groups. Although Arweave’s energy consumption is a fraction of larger chains like Bitcoin, investors should consider this aspect.

Antitrust Concerns

Although decentralized and supported by a worldwide community of miners, Arweave’s goal of becoming the primary data storage platform for the internet could become a concern if it gains a sizable cryptocurrency market share and attracts the attention of regulators.

Is Arweave a Good Investment?

An investment in Arweave AR tokens could also mean an allocation of AO tokens for the new chain. However, to ensure eligibility, holding your AR tokens in a self-custody crypto wallet rather than in a crypto exchange is best.

Arweave has proven to be more volatile than more established coins like Ethereum. A long-term chart tracking performance since 2020 shows an impressive performance in which $AR rose from less than $0.70 per token to about $15 at the end of 2024. However, the value has dropped considerably since reaching an all-time high of more than $82 in 2021’s crypto bull market.

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Future prices depend on several factors, including adoption and the regulatory environment. However, liquidity creates another potential roadblock. To date, only one major exchange offers Arweave to buyers in the US. This could benefit investors, though, particularly if a major US exchange like Coinbase adds Arweave to its platform.

A fixed supply of tokens may bode well for $AR if adoption increases. Both $AR and the new $AO token have fixed maximum supplies. If demand for these tokens increases, prices will rise correspondingly. Future adoption may hinge on the successful launch of the AO chain and its promise to provide “supercomputer” capabilities that could make AO and its Arweave data key in new applications like decentralized artificial intelligence. Both execution and adoption play roles in Arweave’s future success.

Crypto price predictions for Arweave range from $20 by 2030 to as high as $191 by 2030. While predicted ranges often provide a less-than-helpful level of specificity, the community sentiment may prove more telling. Despite occasional downtrends, often due to broad market moves combined with higher volatility, the Arweave investor community remains bullish, with about 85% of respondents indicating they expect higher prices in the future.

Mining Arweave

Although most investors and users won’t mine on the network, it’s helpful to understand how Arweave mining works as part of the Arweave review.

Arweave drew inspiration from Bitcoin in several ways, including its consensus mechanism. However, where Bitcoin uses proof of work, Arweave uses proof of work combined with proof of access to incentivize miners to store as much data as possible.

• Proof of Work: Arweave uses the RandomX algorithm to secure data on the blockweave. Miners compete to solve an algorithmic challenge. A miner who solves the challenge can add the next block to the chain and earn the mining rewards associated with that block.
• Proof of Access: To incentivize miners to store more data, Arweave also uses proof of access, in which the protocol checks for random storage items. Storing more data increases the odds of storing this randomly selected data.

Using RandomX, the same algorithm used by the Monero privacy coin, makes Arweave CPU-friendly and ASIC-resistant. Other proof-of-work protocols like Bitcoin and Kaspa now rely on application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners, adding to the cost of mining equipment and excluding those with less funding. As a result, hardware requirements for mining Arweave can be considerably less in regard to the computer itself. Notably, AMD Ryzen CPUs are ideal for RandomX mining due to their larger L3 cache. This includes Zen 2 and later Ryzen CPUs or Threadripper CPUs.

The storage element of mining is where miners can see a larger investment. Storing more data for the network can lead to higher mining revenue. Many miners choose to use 4TB drives to line up with Arweave’s default partition size of 3.6TB. Several such drives may be required to store enough data to make mining viable.

Conclusion

Although permanent storage isn’t as flashy as decentralized finance or AI, which are selling features for other chains, the addition of the AO chain opens the possibility of making Arweave much more than a storage protocol. Future uses for the AO chain, with Arweave as its data backbone, could include decentralized computing with virtually unlimited scaling and decentralized artificial intelligence applications.

Price action for Arweave has been volatile, and the Arweave crypto token has yet to revisit its all-time highs of 2021. However, the community remains bullish, with many waiting for the rest of the crypto investment community to discover the benefits of Arweave compared to other protocols. If you choose to invest in Arweave or any cryptocurrency, consider doing so as part of a well-diversified portfolio and never invest more than you can afford to lose.

FAQs

References

• Storage Density & Kryder’s Law (networkcomputing.com)
• permanent storage made easy (ardrive.io)
• PermaNotes (permanotes.app)
• Crypto Network Promises Hack-Proof History of Ukraine Attack (bloomberg.com)
• ANS-103: Succinct Proofs of Random Access (github.com)
• Permacoin: Repurposing Bitcoin Work for Data Preservation (microsoft.com)
• Welcome to the Permaweb (medium.com)
• Arweave 2.8: A Major Upgrade For The PermaWeb (businesswire.com)
• Fair Forks: Towards Incentivized Protocol Governance (arweave.net)
• Archain: An Open, Irrevocable, Unforgeable and Uncensorable Archive for the Internet (arweave.net)
• Arweave: A Protocol for Economically Sustainable Information Permanence (arweave.net)
• ArweaveTeam (github.com)
• Economics of the AO Computer (mirror.xyz)
• AO : 100% Fair Launch (arweave.dev)
• Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’) (gdpr-info.eu)
• Coinbase will suspend trading in XRP (coinbase.com)
• Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) (imf.org)
• https://www.coinbase.com/price/arweave (coinbase.com)