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Exclusive interview with Arweave founder Sam Williams: What does the arrival of AO mean?

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2024-03-14 18:58:12855browse

With the development and application of decentralized technology, Arweave’s newly released AO platform has attracted widespread attention.

Recently, Odaily Planet Daily interviewed Sam Williams, the founder of Arweave. This interview takes a deep dive into how Arweave is redefining the way data is stored and accessed with its innovative decentralized storage model and upcoming AO ecosystem.

Sam also mentioned his expectations for the Arweave community and developers in 2024, as well as his ambitions for the future development of Arweave. Through his unique insights, we can gain a deeper understanding of the characteristics of Arweave and how it subverts the current digital storage paradigm and brings revolutionary changes to the world.

专访 Arweave 创始人 Sam Williams:AO 到来,意味什么?

Sam on the video posting AO, source: Twitter

Odaily: First of all Thank you so much for the interview, Sam. What does the launch of AO on Arweave's permanent storage network, this decentralized parallel computing layer, mean for Arweave's own positioning and the development of the ecosystem?

Sam: Arweave is a permanent information storage layer that can support on-chain storage at any scale. When we started this project, we were primarily focused on the archival use case for long-term data preservation. But we are gradually realizing that permanent storage of information enables many other functions. In fact, It is the permanence of information that enables us to build web applications with high trust on this system. These web applications have the same properties as smart contracts - for example, once the developer publishes the user interface of the web application, it cannot be changed. This is the first thing we noticed. Subsequently, we also discovered that decentralized computing and verifiable smart contract-based computing can be achieved by permanently storing calculation logs and using deterministic virtual machines.

By introducing AO, we push this concept to the logical extreme, that is, a super parallel computer that can store calculation logs for any number of processes at the same time, relying on Arweave to support any scale chain The ability to store and enable communication between these processes through message passing. This opens up many possibilities and enables Arweave to provide an extremely scalable smart contract ecosystem far beyond any other system currently on the market. We know this is a bold statement, but we can definitely prove it.

In addition to this, it actually realizes a vision that has been discussed for a long time in the computer science community, which is to have a distributed or decentralized operating system that is trusted and that you can send messages to It adds additional computing units for more utility. So what we've really seen is that, in the long term, we've turned Arweave into a permissionless, globally available supercomputer that anyone on the planet can access at the lowest feasible cost, which is really remarkable. So this means a lot to Arweave's positioning, and I think this is now widely recognized.

This makes Arweave an L1, with its own native financial ecosystem if you will, but that's just the beginning. It also makes Arweave a native L1 for AI agents, autonomous processes that run inside the system, using any amount of computing resources, and then interact with all kinds of things.

But first is finance. We believe this essentially enables a financial ecosystem where the intelligence and settlement are all on-chain. In traditional DeFi, the blockchain is really just a settlement layer, right? They allow you to do exchanges or loans, borrowings, atomic operations, like you exchange X tokens for Y tokens, and this settlement is done on the network. But the intelligence about why you should or shouldn’t do these operations is off-chain. When we look at the traditional financial economy, yes, 70% of exchange interactions originate from bots, not humans.

So one of the obvious things that AO enables you to do is bring all the intelligence that actually drives the market into the network itself and then make it trustworthy. A simple way you can imagine, imagine a fund that wants to invest in a specific category, but you can make that strategy itself autonomous and trustworthy, performing intelligent calculations and acting on it, without having to trust any fund manager. This is a fundamental breakthrough for DeFi and was impossible before. And then in the long run, we think we've actually created this kind of democratized supercomputer. So any developer on the planet can build a program and have it run on a machine with hundreds of thousands of cores if they want to. And they only have to pay for what they actually use. So, in the long run, it may even have uses well beyond the problems that current cryptocurrencies are trying to solve.

Odaily: Thank you. AO and Ethereum sharding technologies are both Layer 1 scaling solutions designed to improve the scalability and throughput of their respective networks. What's the difference between these two solutions?

Sam: The core difference is that AO is built from a character-oriented perspective. First, we built Arweave, an arbitrarily scalable on-chain storage layer. When we say arbitrary expansion, we mean it. On mainnet, it has reached processing speeds of 450 to 500 transactions per second using real user data. There was indeed a moment when the speed hit 1,200 transactions per second, but that didn't matter. We also experimented with 50,000 transactions per second using test data. The point is that it can be easily extended. Therefore, we use this as the basis of the system. We are not trying to create a globally synchronized data space or memory space, which is what almost every smart contract system is trying to do. This is also the core goal of Solana.

We create local memory for each process and then coordinate it through the message passing bus. This is the basic way how traditional distributed system architectures have always scaled in the past. You never try to create a larger single computer, but rather try to leverage multiple computers simultaneously. We actually took this approach and applied it to the blockchain ecosystem. By starting with this layer, this gives us a foundation that allows us to store any amount of data permanently, and you basically get the right underlying layer to build things on top of for free.

So, instead of scaling vertically, as Solana and similar projects are trying to do, we chose to scale horizontally. You can add more computers to the system to increase capacity, which is a completely different approach. There's a lot more to it, but I think this is a good overview.

Odaily: From our perspective, AO seems to emphasize the computing characteristics of Arweave as L1 in addition to storage. Has AO announced the latest update in Denver? What is the roadmap for the future?

Sam: I think AO provides a complete stack for decentralized networks. In the past, you could only use your hard drive space to mine Arweave, but now you can also use your CPU or the bandwidth you have to deliver the information. It actually covers the entire stack of computing, providing availability in this arbitrarily scalable way, enabling what we call a permanent network. The mid-term roadmap is to focus on making payments on top of the system and also creating a proof-of-stake network for it. The testnet currently operates in a so-called proof-of-authority mode, so when initially setting up their processes, developers can choose which keys they trust to send messages to those processes. This will be an implementation of a proof-of-stake system on the mainnet, through which you can stake tokens for messaging on the network. This is the core innovation we will focus on next. We have big plans for this, we just need to implement them and put them into practice.

Odaily: The fork of Arweave by Irys (formerly Bundlr Network) and the reset of the token supply in December 2023 caused some concern among the community and AR holders. Looking back on this incident, what impact did it actually have on Arweave?

Sam: Actually, they didn't fork the network. What this actually means is that people just move to different bundles. I also think this decentralizes the entry points to the network in a good way. I also think the community has learned how to handle various forks. Arweave is a permanent information storage system, which is different from ordinary blockchains. If you reset the state every 5 years, then it cannot perform permanent storage of data.

Fortunately, there is a system in the network that actually gives people an incentive to create forks in what you would call the right way, and to do so in a "pro-social" way. This essentially means they can take the Arweave network and create a fork from a specific block height, they can change the protocol rules in their own version, and they can also add new tokens to reward themselves. This is very important. This means that the data set in that newly forked system will survive and persist. At the same time, token holders’ tokens in the new system will also be extended. If that new version is better, people will eventually switch to it and use it. As a result, token holders are satisfied and fairly compensated, and innovators are happy for innovating on top of the system and receiving new rewards for it. The continuation of data sets is the future.

We have already elaborated a lot on this. We call them evolutionary forks because it creates a tree of protocols and networks that evolve around changes in the environment. This is one of the fundamental ways we think Arweave will get around the problem over project timescales of hundreds of years into the future.

Ultimately, Irys publicly stated that if they forked Arweave, they would follow this framework, this evolutionary fork guidance system, which is a very good thing and the community feels it is important to understand this and we need to socially enforced to ensure that this permanent information storage project can get off the ground and continue in the way we want it to. Overall, I think this is an inspiring and important moment for the community.

Odaily: As a representative in the field of decentralized storage, what is the biggest difference between Arweave and other solutions?

Sam: Arweave focuses on permanent information storage, not temporary information storage. So we do this by creating a storage foundation. Essentially, the way this works is you pay for 200 years of storage upfront, which may sound expensive, but is actually only about half a cent per megabyte. As storage costs fall over time, the purchasing power of the initial payment for storage increases. Yeah, so essentially, this enables you to cover future storage costs indefinitely. The system is designed to be activated for as long a period of time as possible.

This is a business model innovation that would not be possible without blockchain, and we think this is very important. Having a temporary storage system, a temporary decentralized storage may be useful in some areas. But fundamentally, it's just trying to put an existing business model into a network. Blockchain actually makes it harder to build, and you have to exploit its inherent properties to get the best results or create a meaningful network.

Frankly, Bitcoin does this by saying we can have a system where monetary policy is static and protocolized. You can trust monetary policy because no one can change it at will, right? No private company can provide such a service. Ethereum does the same thing, but in the form of a contractual legal system. Arweave does the same, but with a business model centered around permanent information storage. If you try to buy this service from a centralized company, you can never be sure that in the next 50 or 100 years, that company doesn't change its model and your data is gone.

So Arweave takes advantage of the fact that we can protocolize the mathematics of a business model, make it verifiable and static, and be trusted, if you will, without having to trust anyone. So we really think it's important to dig deep into the fundamental properties and usefulness of blockchain, rather than just porting existing systems to run on top. You have to highlight the fundamental things that blockchain makes possible, not just imagine the world in a Web2 way.

Odaily: What are Arweave’s current key data, such as storage volume, market share, categories and proportions of stored data?

Sam: Arweave is used to store large amounts of Web3 data, and it is difficult to accurately calculate the amount of data related to Web3. But we know that for example at Solana, 70% to 80% of the data in the largest 50 NFT series is stored on Arweave, which can give you a good quick overview of the situation.

Over the past year, the use of the web for individual data items has increased dramatically, with staggering growth. I think this time last year, the average network was running at 30 transactions per second. The running rate now is around 450 to 500 per second, depending on the day. So that's a sign that network usage is increasing dramatically over time. What’s exciting is that Arweave can indeed scale on-chain data storage arbitrarily. So no matter how much usage increases, it will continue to scale.

This is why we are so excited about AO. Because of the network we are building,

Arweave is a base layer that does not hinder the scalability of the top-level computing system. If we build on anything else, there will be a breakpoint. But Arweave gives us a solid starting point. On the AO side, over two and a half million messages have been delivered on the AO testnet in just over a week, about 8 days, which is pretty cool. We expect about 100 developers to try it out in the first week. In the end, it was actually 1,500. Need to get exact numbers in this range. So the ecosystem's enthusiasm for this is great.

专访 Arweave 创始人 Sam Williams:AO 到来,意味什么?

AO has reached 5M information volume on the test network. Source: Twitter

Odaily: Can you introduce one or two key projects in the Arweave ecosystem? How do they innovate based on Arweave's features, and what different experiences do they bring to end users?

Sam: Yes, of course. There are many projects out there and I don't want to pick a favorite, but there are a few you might want to check out like Accord and ArDrive, these are simple systems that enable you to upload data to the Arweave network. They have a simple user interface that makes it look and feel like Google Drive, but in reality it runs on a completely decentralized infrastructure. They even allow you to pay with a credit card but sign the data with your own key. So you have the benefits of a self-sovereign identity, but also the ability to access the system extremely quickly even if you don’t have crypto tokens on hand.

There are also projects like Ar.io, a decentralized network of gateways running on top of Arweave that enables decentralized access to web applications. So you can go to any Ario gateway with the prefix Sam, which is my Arns address. So if you go to sam.ar.dev or sam.gateway.io or any other gateway, you get my web application, which is really exciting. It enables us to have full stack decentralized web applications.

There is also a completely different set of applications built on top of Arweave's core infrastructure. For example, decentralized social media systems like Lens, or CyberConnect, all store their posts on top of Arweave because it enables on-chain storage at any scale. And, frankly, I think almost every project that I just mentioned, they all started within the past year using the web. So the growth has been huge.

Odaily: What key collaborations has Arweave had recently?

Sam: Yes, I just mentioned a few, such as Lens and CyberConnect, and Arweave is used to store data across the entire crypto ecosystem. Facts about Web 3 data. I think one of the most interesting and apt descriptions of Arweave is that it is your favorite Web 3 developer's favorite infrastructure tool. So, it's really used extensively across the entire technology stack. I’m particularly excited about Arweave’s use for storing data on-chain. For example, Lens has spent the past six months or so creating an L3 solution on top of Polygon, using Arweave's business data availability network. And then AO is actually a super extension of that model. So, to answer your question, there are really a lot of people using Arweave, and they usually don't tell us when they start using it. They just pick it up and take advantage of the network.

If you want to see where these usages are coming from, I would recommend a project like Data OS where you can dive into it.

A particularly interesting example I want to mention is that there is a team called Dria (Dria.co) that is using Arweave as a decentralized permanent storage network for AI agents. They utilize Arweave to store LLM embeddings , and make it available and authorized so agents can pay for the data they use. This way, everyone who contributes that data is paid and has an open, evolving knowledge base. So, we think that's very exciting. Over the past few months, the network has seen a huge increase in usage due to these use cases around AI.

Odaily: We can continue to talk about strategic planning. What is Arweave’s overall strategic plan in 2024?

Sam: I mean, Arweave is a protocol; I have my own view of how things should be. There are many different organizations in the Arweave ecosystem now. So I can only really tell you what I think. But because the protocol itself is solidified, it doesn't change very often at this point. I think what's really exciting is what we're building, which is the application of a platform like AO. That's the focus of a lot of our attention, and some pretty exciting news.

We will have relatively important news about the decentralized social network on top of Arweave soon. This is where our focus lies. We want to turn Arweave into an L1 ecosystem with the best financial infrastructure, if you will, autonomous agent roaming in the financial infrastructure, as well as social content. It all comes together in a way that we think is really important. If decentralized social media is going to happen, it will require better financialization for creators. By having AO, this super scalable computer, as the bottom layer, providing my layer, then we can scale so that bots can trade content in those social networks in real time. This provides liquidity for creators, which is a very powerful effect that we think will push many creators to Web3 in ways never before possible, but we'll have news on that soon.

Odaily: So what should the community and developers look forward to most in 2024?

Sam: I think it’s the emergence of the AO ecosystem on our platform. If you haven’t tried it today, I really recommend it. This is a unique experience in the crypto space. No other machine works like this. When you want to interact with AO, as a developer you don't need to create your contracts in this rigid environment and then compile them and send them to the network, like Ethereum or whatever. Instead, what you do is start a new process inside AO, just like you would if you had a server inside EC2 or other cloud host, and enter the command.

What we see in 2024 is that the tools around this have matured. Now people are starting to build a pretty large financial ecosystem and infrastructure on top of it, and literally within the first week, things really started to take off. So that's very exciting. You can build things on AO that are completely impossible outside of it. For example, decentralized, verifiable smart contracts could read the entire state of a web page, perhaps they read news and autonomously act on the information in it, etc. Yes, this really is the realization of the dream of a world computer. This time we actually made it happen. It works and is scalable enough to support long-term future use. So we're very excited about that. We think this will change everything.

Odaily: Sounds great. Finally, if I may, I'd like to talk a little bit about tokens. From an investor's perspective, what is the basic logic of AR tokens in the near future, such as security, value retention characteristics, etc.?

Sam: I don’t usually discuss token economics, that’s for sure. Yes, if you want to understand how Arweave works, you can read our documentation.

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