I found Arweave in 2019 when I was 16. I was explaining it to everyone I spoke to at conferences and on Clubhouse (2020) because nobody had ever heard of it. Permanent data storage is *incredibly* useful, but it wasn’t sexy. Yield farming was.
That changed in 2021, when all of a sudden NFTs became the new zeitgeist. Arweave solved a problem nothing else could at the time: preventing NFTs from going offline.
I no longer had to explain Arweave to everyone. People understood it, but for the wrong reason: the price chart.
Crypto commoditizes capitalism; it becomes extremely easy to build incentives and mechanisms around people and machines to do things. The problem is that these incentives tend to cloud our field of view as market participants. We can forget and even ignore where they come from and why they exist. Arweave is a perfect example of this.
Arweave is not cool. VCs aren’t tweeting about it. People aren’t getting lifechanging airdrops. Nobody is out raising hundreds of millions in capital. You’re not getting clickbaited, but yet you expect to be.
On top of this, there is no core team for Arweave. You aren’t promised a roadmap. Sometimes there isn’t even anybody to talk to when you need help using it.
This has led many to believe Arweave is dead and its growth will be forever hindered by the fact that there isn’t a single person pushing it forward. A lot of people are angry, frustrated, and confused.
And you’re right, there isn’t a single person pushing it forward; there are many of us, and I am one. Where was the CEO of the internet when it took off?
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I’m 22 now. For some, Arweave is an asset. For me, it’s been a new hope for the internet and core focus for almost a third of my life. In an industry of shiny objects, I’ve chosen, at every opportunity, to keep building here. Despite the lack of “narrative.” Despite the lack of marketing. Despite the hundreds of millions flowing to other areas of crypto.
Why?
It’s being used on cheese farms in Hungary. It’s being used to archive war evidence. It’s being used to share information that people in countries like China and Russia would not otherwise have access to. It’s storing blocks for other blockchains.
It’s powering a decentralized supercomputer (
@aothecomputer) that makes every other blockchain look like a calculator. It wins in *every* category. It’s more scalable. It’s faster. It’s cheaper. It’s more permissionless. It works with >40 languages. And soon, it’ll be easier to build on (docs). It can even make transactions on other chains.
But it isn’t cool. The zeitgeist isn’t here. It’s in AI. It’s in agents.
But I am still here. I will remain here until Arweave wins. Until people see through the narratives and understand that paying a one-time fee to store a piece of data for >200yrs in hundreds of places around the world means more than the price of the token. Because it’s useful.
It isn’t sexy. It isn’t paying you to use it. It isn’t well known. But it is original, and different, and unique in the problems it solves.
And it’s growing. Regardless of its price. Regardless of a narrative. Regardless of a core team.
What are you doing on the next futuristic hyperscalable token-go-up layer 123abc designed to solve defi once and for all, anon? I’m being serious. Do you want to revolutionize casino products or try something the world has never seen before?
I’m here for the adventure and the green field, and I’m here to help make something that outgrows the zeitgeist.
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If you made it this far, why does Arweave matter to you? I know I’m not alone in this. I really want to know.