Exchange Arweave (AR)

Arweave (AR) is a utility token of the Arweave project — a blockchain-like decentralized storage solution. Arweave was founded in 2017 and as of 2021 is in its alpha stage. The project has attracted the attention of well-known investors like Andreessen Horowitz.

Arweave’s team points out that the centralized information storage model puts too much control in one agent’s hands: the information can be easily changed after it was first put into storage, for example. This is what the blockchain solutions are designed to avoid. Arweave uses blockweave — a blockchain-like structure that ties every new block (by hashing) not just to the previous one, but also to one additional block chosen at random. This is a part of what is called Proof-of-Access consensus; the nodes don’t have to store copies of the whole blockchain as long as they can access a specific block. 

Among other novel features of Arweave are blockshadows: this is the technology allowing not to waste space and bandwidth distributing every mined block to every node in the network. Instead, only partial information is disseminated, letting the nodes reconstruct the block. To facilitate rapid data retrieval, Arweave implements the Wildfire system, which resembles a peer-provided rating system and encourages efficient work.

Arweave’s consensus mechanism combines Proof-of-Access (described above) and Proof-of-Work. As an incentive for their work, the miners get AR tokens. They are also used as transaction fees and as a payment for the Arweave storage services.