ICO review - Arweave

Arweave is a blockchain-based platform that provides scalable low-cost on-chain data storage.

Idea

Arweave is addressing a few key issues in today’s online space –centralization, censorship, monitoring and the rapidly increasing demand for online data storage that can be truly owned and controlled by the users.Arweave is based on four layers (technologies) that operate together to create a highly-scalable (5000 TPS), permanent storage that costs considerably lower than most of the existing competition:

1. Blockweave is the blockchain structure behind Arweave’s project that allows for a low cost on-chain storage. As the amount of data stored increases, the amount of hashing needed for consensus decreases, which reduces the cost of storing data. The main benefits of storing data on-chain is that it becomes part of the consensus mechanism, but most importantly, it gives Arweave’s users the ability to pay once and store forever.
2. Proof of Access: a new consensus mechanism. Instead of competing who can solve puzzles (tasks) and use exponential amount of electricity (as in common PoW consensus mechanism), miners will compete who can replicate the most data, which assures that the energy (electricity) used while mining will decrease over time.
3. Wildfire- it’s an incentive mechanism that stimulates miners to share date with each other. The faster data is stored and shared with other miners in the network, the easier it will be for a miner to build positive reputation. As nodes in blockweave networks require fast access to data in order to mine in an efficient way, they are incentivized to share data to other members of the network quickly and continuously, autonomously improving the sharing experience by making it much faster.
4. Blockshadows: Arweave’s goal is to create long-term on-chain data storage and to make that possible, the network has to support unlimited sized blocks. Arweave uses a system that decouples transaction distribution from that of block distribution in the network. Only a “shadow”(important basic information like transaction hashes, wallet list hash) of the block is moved around the system instead of the full block itself. This allows for higher speed and scalability topping at around 5000 transactions per second. Think of shadow blocks as blocks that contain valuable, yet very low in size, information that can be moved in the system allowing for high speed and no congestion.

Use cases:

1. Decentralized data storage: personal and corporate files can be stored for a single fee instead of monthly subscription. The price of AR tokens can be cheaper than the monthly fees paid for competitors such as Filecoin (blockchain space) or AWS. Data availability is almost instant due to the design of the blockchain incentive mechanism
2. Decentralized data sharing: content can be uploaded anonymously and shared with anybody. Math pricing function that allows for load-balancing demand and supply at fair prices.
3. Decentralized data collaboration: Allows for availability of experimental databases for review meaning anybody can challenge and/or confirm its quality. The academic publishing market is around 25 billion USD and Arweave has already partnered with Charité (check partners) in that regard.
4. Decentralized data Identity/Protection: Content created online can be timestamped and provide proof of ownership
5. AR (native token) is utility token. AR’s primary use is to add data to the blockweave

Competition:

1. Sia, Storj, Filecoin What Arweaves does ahead of its competition is incentivizing a decentralized storage for large volumes of data. Unlike most other solutions that require either a monthly subscription or payment based on data size, Arweave goal is to provide permanent, immutable data storage for a fraction of the price of other well-known competitors such as Filecoin, Siacoin and Storj. The longer you keep your data on-chain, the cheaper it gets to store it there.

Team

Team of 8 with 5 devs. The founding team is inexperienced with most of the them being fresh graduates. Nothing impressive. Some decent advisors-Manager at Opera, Managing Director at Techstars, Head of Growth at Quantstamp.

• Co-Founder&CEO:Sam Williams, Education: PhD, Computer Science at University of Kent (373rd World). Assistant Lecturer at University of Kent, CEO&Co-founder of Minimum Spanning technologies
• Co-Foudner&CTO: William Jones, Education: PhD, Computer Science at University of Kent, CTO&Co-founder of Minimum Spanning Technologies(present)-nothing found, Assistant Lecturer at University of Kent
• CCO&Deisgner: India Raybould, Education: BS, Psychology, University of Manchester. Psychology student advisor at Canterbury Christ Church University
• Developer’s Team Highlights: PHP dev at boohoo.com (large UK-based online fashion retailer), Head of Blockchain Solutions at The Vanbex Group (company specialized in consulting, communications & development for global blockchain businesses)

Advisors:

• Anthony Ryan: Head of Growth at Quantstamp
• Jesper Noehr: Project Manager Opera (1y in 2006–2007)
• Jeremy Epstein: VP-Marketing&Social Navigator at Sprinklr (large company), Cargill (large international food producer and marketer)
• Rob Johnson: Managing Director at Techstars
• Bruno De Sousa: Head of Business Development of Cargill
• Julian Lenz: Techstars mentor, and a crypto investor since 2013. Nothing found on LinkedIn
• Fabian Dudek: Entrepreneur. Founder of nestpick (aggregator platform for midterm, furnished rentals-received 13 million USD funding), GlassDollar, Entrepreneur in Residence at Techstars
• Christian Eggert: Tech entrepreneur of Bonativo (german food delivery company — 3.2 million EUR funding) and MINODES( platform of Consumer Analytics and Marketing Services, received 7.6 million EUR, acquired by Telefónica NEXT)

Partners:

• Techstars (large seed accelerator) -Arweave is officially a member of the TechStars Berlin city 2018 startup accelerator programme. Techstars also invested in the project
• Upvest: Platform to purchase, store and trade cryptographic tokens.Responsible for the ICO process
• Northblock:Providing consultancy and advisory services to the project
• Shelf Network -Protocol as a platform to offer multi merchant auctioning. They will use Arweave’s data structure to store auction listings
• Charité –One of the largest university hospitals in Europe. Arweave will be collaborating with biomedical scientists from Charité to create a new open access scientific journal.The Journal of Raw Data will be an online-only open access peer-reviewed biomedical data journal, utilizing the Arweave network for truly permanent data storage

Token Metrics

1. Hardcap: 8.7 million USD
2. Total Tokens: 65 million in total, 55 million Genesis Block and 11 million for mining
3. Crowdsale: Before mainnet launch on 8th of June
4. Symbol: AR, native token (ERC-20 won’t be issued)

SocialNetwork

1. Telegram: 28000
2. Twitter: 2300

Verdict

Pluses:

1. Data storage economy is expected to continue growing in a very fast pace
2. Active and good Github presentation, mainenet is launching on 8th of June
3. Solid partnerships and advisors
4. Low cap and and decent market awareness

Minuses:

1. Most of the core team members are fresh graduates
2. Saturated space with strong competition
3. Lack of important information like roadmap, whitepaper and detailed token metrics and more