Arweave

Arweave is a decentralized layer-1 storage protocol and open ledger engineered for permanent data preservation and decentralized web hosting. Unlike conventional cloud infrastructure that charges monthly rental fees, Arweave uses a blockweave data structure and a storage endowment model that lets users pay a single upfront fee in AR tokens to preserve information indefinitely.

Team and background

Founded in 2018 by Sam Williams, the project originally began under the name Archain before rebranding to Arweave. The project is community-driven, with an operating team of roughly 11 to 50 people distributed globally across Europe, North America, and Asia.

How the protocol works

Arweave operates on a Proof of Access consensus mechanism paired with verifiable delay functions. Miners compete to produce new blocks by proving they retain access to historical data chunks from past blocks, creating an economic incentive to replicate the entire dataset. In November 2025, the weave dataset was divided into 103 distinct 3.6TB partitions. Network transactions and accounts support RSA keys as well as ECDSA secp256k1 keys, activated in the 2.9 hard fork. Arweave addresses are SHA-256 hashes of the public key, meaning AR tokens cannot be sent to native Ethereum addresses. In February 2025, the ecosystem expanded its execution capabilities with the mainnet rollout of AO Computer, a hyper-parallel compute layer that uses Arweave as an immutable data availability substrate.

Fees and storage economics

Uploading files requires paying an upfront network fee denominated in AR. The majority of this fee does not go immediately to the miner who mines the block. Instead, it flows into a protocol-managed storage endowment that yields payouts to miners over extended periods as storage hardware costs decrease. This structure provides miners with ongoing hardware compensation over time.

Network track record and risks

The Arweave mainnet has operated since 2018 under an open-source MIT license. In June 2026, an ecosystem incident occurred when malware was detected in third-party Arweave npm libraries. Miners and node operators must independently handle compliance with local data protection regulations such as GDPR. Because uploaded content is permanently immutable, misconfigured transactions or accidental uploads of sensitive material cannot be altered or removed from the blockweave.