Positive strides are being taken to develop Arweave's three main use cases (the preservation of data; resistance to censorship; and the empowerment of creators with digital ownership) in a decentralized manner.
In this episode, we discuss the latest and greatest of what's been happening on Arweave, touching on The Graph's announcement regarding indexing on Arweave, Redstone's formation of a DAO, permanent NFTs, the Metaplex Candy Machine, and the Bundler Network's incoming token.
The Graph
A custom integration is being built so that all Arweave data will be available via The Graph. This means that a layer 2 on top of Arweave will index Arweave's data and make that data available in a decentralized fashion. This should mean that faster speeds are achieved when querying from The Graph than when querying from Arweave.
"All of the services which rely on Arweave and all of the peripheral ecosystem companies are starting to need to outsource their computing power to other node operators and incentive them to do so."
Redstone
Redstone is opening up its node network for others to operate. (Previously nodes were only running from its own HQ on AWS.) The system will run as a proof of stake system using Redstone's native token.
The node will be responsible for collecting pricing data to feed the oracle. The node aggregates that data and removes any anomalies in order to quickly return precise price data on a variety of commodities (all of the main crypto-tokens, as well as commodities like grain and cheese).
Permanent NFTs and the Atomic NFT Standard
There is fragility with NFTs right now. If a developer stops paying for a file to be hosted, it will be gone.
The majority of Ethereum-based NFTs right now are hosted on IPFS or on a centralised server (Amazon or Microsoft). These assets are extremely vulnerable to becoming unavailable or taken down in an outage or if the developer stops caring about the project.
Another aspect of fragility is the manner in which certain NFTs are stored. To take the famous CryptoPunks as an example: these are hosted on the LAVAlabs website, but they are hosted as one part of a grid image of all of the CryptoPunks. So what you are really purchasing when you buy a CryptoPunk is the grid position of your CryptoPunk within that grid. This is very fragile.
More broadly, people are starting to turn away from IPFS.
"On IPFS the node operators are not incentivised to continue storing data. Whereas on Arweave miners are incentivised to keep the assets around for as long as possible - to keep earning from it."
The Atomic NFT Standard is an Arweave-native standard using Smartweave contracts which allows creators to deploy contracts alongside the media file. This means that the whole NFT is bundled together with its media - with both being stored on Arweave permanently.
Metaplex Candy Machine
The Metaplex Candy Machine which relies on Arweave for its storage is what forced Arweave network to scale.
First there were just a few thousand Metaplex Candy Machines deployed, then there were 10,000 deployed - now there are more than 20,000 deployed.
"The single biggest driver of scalability improvements to Arweave has been this growth of Metaplex Candy Machine."
Development of The Bundler network
The Bundler Network is an excellent innovation. It fixes an unprecedented problem with the Arweave network - a problem which every blockchain faces - which is that miners are incentivised to mine the transactions which have the greatest rewards.
The Bundler is responsible for constantly attempting to submit data until it goes through - it cannot fail.
The Bundler network is in the process of forming a DAO and will soon be using $BNDR as part of its mining with a proof of stake concept.
If you'd like to find out more about these projects:
The Graph Website: https://thegraph.com/en/
Redstone Website: https://redstone.finance/
Metaplex Candy Machine Website: https://www.metaplex.com/
