Happy birthday, Arweave!
Today marks the 8th anniversary of the launch of Arweave mainnet.
Over the last year, the centralized training wheels of the permaweb have come off. Gateways, bundlers, and the query layer are all now open to be run by anyone, and incentives are coming into place.
Today there are...
1️⃣ Trustless, verifiable gateways: The main gateways to Arweave now all serve their data in trustless, verifiable form. Every response comes with all of the information needed to verify that the content that they asked for is the data that they received.
2️⃣ Incentives for gateway operators: Anyone can join a gateway and permissionlessly start to earn for serving content to users. This gateway has started to take over serving a small portion of Arweave . net’s end-user traffic, scaling up over time.
3️⃣ Decentralized bundlers: You can now upload data through a decentralized network of bundlers which anyone can join and start to serve permaweb user requests through. Node operators can earn by running nodes in this network permissionlessly, and users can trust the LapEE(/TEE) implementations, not the node operators themselves.
4️⃣ Decentralized indexers: Those community run LapEE/TEE nodes can even now be used to index and query data on Arweave, inheriting the same trust-minimization properties as bundlers. No public router for this just yet, but try it on your own node — it works 🙂.
A year ago none of these were possible. Each was a hard fought battle and there is still a long way to go to make them the defaults in the ecosystem, but the bedrock is now in-place.
Where next?
8 years is a long time, and while the mission of Arweave remains immutable the structure of the web itself is shifting: From discrete apps each with a separate team, to a world of agent-built services customized for each user. The next web will not look like the last.
I am truly excited about this because Arweave’s permaweb is the perfect substrate for a web that is no longer defined by static, siloed UIs, but instead morphs and mutates at the speed of user’s wishes. For many years we have focused on creating a web that enables composability through…
➡️ Open content: Owned by users, accessible in every app – rather than any single company/service.
➡️ Open infrastructure: Shared between every app, permissionlessly utilized to back every app, not any single particular application.
…and now this stack is finally able to be decentralized, too.
This architecture just so happens to offer exactly the mix of attributes needed to create an open version of the agent-driven web. When a useful/fun app is just an afternoon’s work, rather than a year’s, creators (no longer just limited to devs) do not want to run specific infrastructure or hire a team just for that single service. Instead, an existing open catalogue of content, matched with open infrastructure they can simply start to send calls to, is the perfect place to build.
Can’t wait to see this in practice. More soon.
Onwards! 🙂