Arweave: A Technical Overview

Arweave is a decentralized data storage network that is content-agnostic and designed to provide scalable and permanent on-chain storage in a sustainable manner. It is created to address two main problems in a data-centric and information-driven world: censorship-prone information centralization and high transaction costs for storing data on-chain on traditional Layer 1 blockchains like the Ethereum network.

Blockchain technology has had success in meeting the promise of resilient and decentralized information storage due to its nature of immutability. However, to achieve large-scale information storage on a blockchain, current transaction costs remain high and scalability is limited as traditional blockchains were not designed with large-scale decentralized information storage as the main goal. Arweave, along with its other competitors, was created to address this problem. Its novel data structures, consensus mechanism and incentives scheme are designed specifically with decentralized data storage and interoperability with traditional web infrastructure in mind.